


Calling it Hope

by Miss_Peletier



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-12
Updated: 2017-04-03
Packaged: 2018-10-03 04:00:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 33,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10235417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_Peletier/pseuds/Miss_Peletier
Summary: After learning some unexpected news, Abby Griffin struggles to hold the weight of the world on her shoulders while the man she loves remains in Polis. Trying to solve various problems related to nuclear radiation is one thing, but keeping a secret from Marcus - at least until he returns - is another.





	1. Diagnosis

Everything looked like him, smelled like him, felt like him.

From the trinkets on his bedside table to the paintings on the wall, Abby could practically sense Marcus Kane in the room. She could see him sitting in the chair at his small metal table poring over maps of the surrounding area, laying in bed reading one of the numerous books from his amassed quantity on his bookshelf, gently hanging his guard jacket on the hook on the back of the door.

He was everywhere and nowhere, with her and in Polis.

Some logical part of her knew it was silly, girlish even, to come wandering into his room in the middle of the night when she couldn’t sleep. What was she, a lovesick teenager? She’d only returned from Polis that morning, could still taste their goodbye kiss on her tongue. His “may we meet again” still echoed in her heart, her head, written into her pulse. A few hours was by no means enough to stir the deepest depths of absence-induced longing in her heart, but it was enough to make her uncomfortable: enough to drive her thoughts back along the path she’d travelled and up into their room in the tower.

What was he doing right now? Had Roan fought and won? Was the alliance still intact? And if it wasn’t, had he, Octavia, and Indra gotten out of the city safely?

Again, _logic_ : there was little merit in giving weight to unfounded questions and doubts. But with Luna’s arrival – and illness – it had been a chaotic day, and Abby had quickly begun tiring of reining in her wayward brain. Her exhaustion pushed her doubts into a downward spiral, and a constant, nagging churning in her stomach hadn’t subsided since she heard the Polis gates close behind her. It had become increasingly difficult to force herself to remain sensible where Marcus Kane was concerned.

Such ruminations would be typical of the kids – of Monty and Harper, maybe, whom she’d just learned were in a relationship – but she was a grown woman, well past having learned how to cope with the absence of the man she loved. She constantly reminded herself that Marcus was fine, that this was by no means the first time they’d been separated, that they’d been parted during far more strenuous times in the past. All things considered, this separation should have given her less cause to worry than the others.

And yet, when she woke from a hellacious City of Light flashback of a nightmare, there was only one person she wanted to see. One man whose arms she wished were around her, one voice she wanted to hear soothing her as she briefly struggled to see through the hazy mirage of dreams. But her bed was empty, the sheets around her cold with his absence, her skin cool without the warmth of him beside her. As she took a seat in one of the cold metal chairs at his table and rested her elbows on the surface – then her head in her hands – she took deep breaths and tried to shove the tears searing at the corners of her eyes into submission.

It may have been late – later than almost anyone else in Arkadia would be awake – but she’d left the door open out of an informal self-reassurance. She couldn’t give into this now: not when they’d only been separated for less than a day. She just needed to be here, she told herself, for a few minutes. To feel him for long enough to calm her racing heartbeat, to absorb the remnants of his smile and laughter that remained in those stationary objects. Being here was like sitting in the sunlight; she felt safe, warm, hopeful.

When she was here, she was with Marcus.

Lifting her head from her hands and brushing a few strands of hair out of her eyes, she glanced around the room and saw something familiar: his guard jacket. He hadn’t hung it on the back of the door as he typically did (even before they were together, months of holding informal meetings in his room made her privy to his habits), instead, it was neatly folded on his bed. Her feet moved before her brain could fire to stop them, and she quietly pushed in his chair to walk over to the bed.

At first she was torn, merit on both sides of her dilemma: whether to pick up the garment or leave it there. She guessed someone had left it for him to find when he returned, given the precision in the fold and the careful placement on his bed, but it was also one of his most well-worn items. If anything could give her even the tiniest moment of inner peace, his jacket would do it.

So she reached out and picked it up, letting the open air unfold it before her.

The last time she’d seen him wear it had been weeks – only weeks? – ago, just before Pike relieved him of his command. It hadn’t changed much since then, the Skaikru patch on the arm missing from his trade with the grounder woman in Polis (when Polis had been a city of sunshine instead of bloodshed). It was almost impossible to believe how much had changed since then – both how far the world around them had fallen and how close they’d become.

She breathed in, and the scent was his: soft, slightly sweet, the smell of earth after a rainstorm. Comforting, quiet, calm. Peaceful. Hopeful. Something inside her fixed itself after her deep inhale, and the vise around her lungs relaxed. Those images – images of a scalpel and her hand and her daughter, images of a rope around her neck, images of a cross and him and a hammer – melted away, leaving her with only tranquility. As long as she had his jacket, he was never far away. Her chest expanded again as she repeated the process, intoxicated off the scent of him, tempted to take the jacket back to her quarters. Just in case.

“I thought I might find you here,” a voice declared from the doorway, and Abby jumped. Her eyelids snapped open and she lowered the jacket to her side, still unwilling to let go of it. She followed the sound to the doorway and…

“Raven?” she said, incredulous. Her room was on the other side of Arkadia, not to mention that she’d been relieved of her command more than two hours ago so she could get some sleep. If there had been a list of people she thought that voice might belong to, Raven Reyes would have been at the bottom of the list. And yet here she stood, clad in her simple red shirt and cargo pants: she hadn’t even changed into pajamas. Something was wrong, and Abby felt a sharp need to determine what it was.

“Are you all right?” she asked, gaze trailing toward the girl’s leg. There were still complications that needed to be solved, now that the City of Light had returned her pain to her. It wasn’t too far-fetched to believe her leg had prevented her from getting some much-needed rest.

Thankfully, Raven shook her head. She leaned against the doorway, arms crossed, ponytail swishing at the gentle motion.

“I’m fine, Abby,” she said, keeping her voice low. “Just couldn’t sleep. Decided to go for a walk.”

Abby nodded. “And you looked in here and saw…”

“Well, it was better than walking in on Monty and Harper,” she said, aiming a wry smile Abby’s way. “If the worst I’m gonna have to deal with is walking in on you holding your boyfriend’s jacket, I can handle it.”

Abby laughed, though a slight flush accompanied the sound. Memories of their time in Polis flooded back at Raven’s insinuation, and…if she’d been there, there were much worse things Raven Reyes could have walked in on.

“Next time I’ll close the door,” Abby said, earning a laugh from her companion. “Just to be safe.”

“Yeah, I’m more worried about what happens when Kane gets back,” Raven said, taking a few steps into the room. She leaned against the side of Marcus’ table, her hip pressing against the metal edge. “These walls aren’t soundproof. If it wasn’t for the end of the world, I would get working on that.”

Her fingers tightened around the worn material, skin tingling with the ghost of kisses past. There was an element of truth in Raven’s words, as loath as she was to admit it: when Marcus came back, they wouldn’t be in their own private room in Polis. They’d be in the heart of Arkadia, with nosy teenagers and confused civilians meandering around during all hours of the day and night. But nine days of languid indulgence had been something, at least. Now memories to cherish.

“If it wasn’t the end of the world, we would all be working on different things,” Abby said, joining her on the other side of the table. Her presence seemed to make Raven keen on sitting, and, by some unspoken agreement, they both took seats on opposite sides of the table.

“It’s always the end of the world,” Raven remarked. “Only thing that changes is the timeline. This time we’ve got six months until certain death.”

There was a dark edge to her tone that tripped something in Abby’s senses: something that reminded her of Clarke. Of the burdens she’d carried. Without Sinclair Raven was the head of Engineering, and at the lateness of the hour her composure was starting to slip. There was no hiding it – Raven was exhausted.

“How are you?” Abby asked, her tone conveying the depth of her concern. “Really, Raven. If something’s wrong, you can tell me.”

“Hey, I’m not the one standing in the middle of my boyfriend’s room getting high off his jacket.”

Abby resisted the urge to roll her eyes. As much as she loved Raven…

“You miss him,” the girl added, and the urge evaporated. Struck by the change in her tone – from joking to genuine emotion – she had to take a few moments before responding.

“Yes,” she said. One word was enough.

“I didn’t have to ask,” Raven said. “It was pretty obvious.”

Suddenly, Abby put two and two together to arrive at a four that never should have added up.

“You called him my ‘boyfriend,’” she said, wincing a little internally at the rusty word. Marcus was many things, but he meant more to her than such a feeble term. ‘Soulmate,’ she thought, or ‘hope,’ fit closer. “How did you know we were together? Did Clarke tell you?”

“Nah,” Raven said. “She wouldn’t talk about it unless she knew you guys were okay with going public. Everything I know, I learned from ALIE.”

Abby raised her eyebrows, and Raven elaborated.

“She kinda…upgraded me. So I know more about computers, but she gave me info about the people she had in the City of Light, too. So I knew about you and Kane.”

“Oh,” Abby said, uncertain what else there was to say. Not that she minded Raven knowing – once Marcus returned, the truth would come out anyway – but it would have been nice if they’d been able to choose when and how.

“I haven’t told anyone, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Raven said, reading her. “But for the record, I’m pretty sure seventy-five percent of Arkadia thought you guys were already together when he left.”

Thinking back, Abby could understand the assertion. Marcus had rarely left her side during the three months when Clarke had been gone. And although nothing had happened, the constant association was all it took to get people talking – to get rumors flying. Fortunately, she’d always been too busy to hear them.

But was it fortunate? What if she had heard something, all those months ago? What if she’d come to Marcus with it then, instead of waiting until the hour of his execution to realize the depth of her feelings? To feel the weight of all the things she thought she’d never be able to say? If she’d talked to him then, could their six months have been eight? Seven? Nine?

She felt the weight of his jacket in her lap and swallowed hard.

“I can understand why people might have…” she stopped, trailing off. Raven gave her a soft smile. “We spent a lot of time together. But until Pike, nothing happened.”

Raven nodded, understanding the reference was as much to clarify anything that might wind its way back to Clarke as it was for her own understanding. “For whatever it’s worth, everyone I talked to about it wanted you guys to happen,” she said. “Sinclair was _this_ close to pretending there was an emergency as an excuse to lock you guys in a closet together.”

Her smile took on a quiet wistfulness, a soft grief.

“He’d be proud of you, Raven,” Abby said, reaching across the table to slide her hand overtop of the mechanic’s. “You’re doing so much to help. People look up to you.”

Raven shifted her hand slightly, turning it so she could hold Abby’s in return.

“He could have done better,” she said. “He could have figured this out.”

It might have been the low lighting – the feathery beams of white that drifted in from the hallway, highlighting her tanned skin in patchy lines – but Abby thought she glimpsed tears in the girl’s eyes.

“And you’re going to figure it out, too,” she said, giving her hand a reassuring squeeze. “I know it.”

“Thanks,” Raven said, somber.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, listening to the gentle hum of generators and the white noise of the flickering lights. Then, without prompt, Raven shattered the quiet.

“Bellamy put his jacket back,” she said. “He found it a few days ago. Guess he wanted Kane to be surprised when he got home.”

Instinctively, Abby’s fingers froze on the material. Taking it back to her room with her was out of the question, then: the last thing she wanted was to step on something Bellamy Blake had carefully planned. While he and Marcus weren’t blood-related, they might as well have been. And the present of his guard jacket, returned to him by the boy he all but considered his son…she wouldn’t deprive him of that.

“I’ll leave it on his bed, then,” Abby said, stomach sinking as she realized she’d be parted with the thing that felt most like him. “It was nice of Bellamy to give it back.”

“Yeah, well, he still feels shitty about everything that happened with Pike,” Raven said, as though her words were self-explanatory. To some extent they were – although over a week of time spent in Polis had blurred the memory around the edges, she remembered Marcus’ speech to the boy just before he and Clarke left. _You turn the page. You don’t look back._ “He wants to make up for it however he can. The jacket wasn’t a bad place to start.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Abby agreed, remembering how heartbroken Marcus had been when Pike “relieved him of his command.” When he came back to Arkadia and found the jacket in his room, he’d be overjoyed. And right now, they could all stand to find some joy in their lives. “But he doesn’t have to atone for anything, Raven,” she added. “I don’t think Marcus ever thought there was something to forgive. He might not have agreed with his choices, but he knew Bellamy would come through.”

Raven shrugged, her delicate shoulders moving in the dim light. “Hey, tell that to _him_ ,” she said. “I already know Kane’s basically his dad.”

In spite of herself, the deep melancholy she’d been feeling, Abby couldn’t stop a laugh from bubbling up her throat and past her lips.

“Is that common knowledge?”

“Pretty much. Then again, I guess you guys kind of adopted all of us.”

Her smile turned soft, her head tilted a fraction. To some extent, Raven was right – she’d become close with all the kids, not just Clarke. And who else did they have, really? Other than Nathan, who still had his dad, the rest of them were orphans. She’d never really thought about it, but…

“Are you saying we’re your parents?” Abby asked, both amused and curious.

“I’m saying you might as well be,” she said. “You both act like it. You’re good at it. And…that wasn’t a luxury all of us had on the Ark, you know?”

Abby’s gaze dropped to the airbrushed steel of the table, picking out the scratches and dents that evidenced years of use. She still had her doubts about whether or not her parenting qualified as “good,” but thankfully she and Clarke had laid the past to rest. The subject of Jake and her wedding rings hadn’t yet come up – they’d been too busy with Luna to have a moment for themselves – but the discussion was coming, and she hoped her daughter would understand. After all, she planned to give the rings to her.

“Raven,” Abby said, her voice soft as she remembered the girl’s situation on the Ark. _Finn’s all I have left._ “Anytime you need someone to-“

“I was talking about Murphy,” she said, evaporating the emotion in the room with one word. “Dude had a screwed up childhood.”

Her tone was a little too light, her smile a little too forced, and Abby knew there had been truth in her statement. That despite Murphy’s less-than-pleasant family life, Raven’s growing up in space hadn’t been carefree, either. And their reunion – the way she hugged her when she walked through the Arkadia gates and thanked Abby for saving her life – evidenced more than Raven would ever admit aloud.

If Raven wanted a mother figure, Abby would be proud to serve that role. Warmth expanding in her chest, Abby stared at her from across the table and let her gaze speak for her: she didn’t trust her voice to remain steadfast.

“I used to stay in Finn’s room after he was sent to the Skybox,” Raven said after a beat, changing the subject. “His parents didn’t know he took the fall for me, so they just let me in. I mean, to them I was just his girlfriend. And we all missed him. As shitty as I felt about everything…it made me feel close to him. It helped.”

Abby nodded, remembering the boy Raven had loved. There was now bare skin where his necklace used to lay, but Abby knew better than anyone that the absence of a memento didn’t mean absence in one’s heart.

“My point is, you’re not stupid for wanting to be close to Kane,” Raven said. “Even though he’s gone. You love him. If you want to sleep in his room and hold his clothes, no one’s gonna judge you. We’ve all been through hell. We’re _going_ through hell. If this is what makes it a little better for you, you should do it.”  

Abby, stunned, could only give her a nod. How had she known exactly what she was thinking, what she was feeling? Had it been so easy to tell? Could everyone have known her feelings for Marcus before she knew them herself?

She opened her mouth to say something – anything – but the girl cut her off by standing abruptly from her chair. The noise of metal on metal was louder than she’d intended, and her full lips twisted into a grimace when they heard the sound echoing down the hallway.

“Right,” Raven said after an awkward pause. “Anyway. I’m gonna go nag Bellamy to get some sleep. I get that he has nightmares, but at some point we’ve all gotta suck it up. Face our demons.”

Abby sensed the declaration was more for her own benefit that Bellamy’s, but she stood to say her last goodbye for the night. She wound her way around the table, left Marcus’ jacket on the surface, placed both hands on the young girl’s shoulders.

“If you ever want to talk about anything,” she said, “I’m here, Raven. Always.”

For a moment Raven stayed quiet, regarding her in the yellow halo of light from the rest of the station, her brown eyes unreadable. Then, as if on an impulse, Raven leaned forward and gathered her close in a tight hug.

Taken by surprise, Abby gently wrapped her arms around the girl and held her back just as tightly. While Raven wasn’t given to public displays of affection – the simple fact that she’d gotten a hug in front of everyone upon her return was enough to leave Abby shocked and in awe – she wondered if the knowledge of the impending doomsday was changing that aspect of her personality.

Or maybe, she thought, the girl just wanted to give her a hug.

“I’m really happy you’re okay,” Raven whispered, her voice shaking with the ghost of a computer program of which she’d never be free, trembling with gratitude. Abby ran her fingers gently up and down her back, remembering how Clarke used to find it comforting when she cried.

“I’m happy you’re okay, too.”

The embrace lasted only a few seconds longer – apparently, Raven wasn’t _that_ comfortable with prolonged displays of emotion – and when she stepped away her expression held an air of slight embarrassment. But Abby, her heart soaring and breaking and aching all at once, realized the simple contact had mended something broken inside her. That after that, tonight, she might yet be able to get some sleep.

“I’d better see you leaving this room tomorrow morning,” Raven said, accompanying her vague threat with a dazzling smile. “’Cause I’m not gonna deal with you moping around tomorrow and sighing about how much you miss your boyfriend.”

Abby smiled. “I haven’t been moping, Raven. And I’ve never _sighed_ about Marcus.”

“Yeah, okay,” she said, playfully sarcastic, aiming a wink her way as she turned to leave. “Whatever you say, Abby.”

But despite her misgivings, Abby Griffin fell asleep that night in Marcus Kane’s bed, inhaling his scent off linen sheets, fingers curled around one of his old t-shirts.

Even the ghost of him was strong enough to keep the nightmares at bay.

* * *

 

**_TWO WEEKS LATER_ **

Curled in the warmth of him – or rather, the warmth of his bed – Abby barely heard the knocking at the door until it threatened to awaken all of Arkadia. Confused, shaking the cobwebs of sleep from her slowly-awakening mind, she wondered why Marcus’ alarm clock hadn’t gone off. Usually she rose of her own accord early in the morning, was one of the first people in their camp with her feet on the ground to start the day. But John Murphy had been given express instructions to wake her if she hadn’t risen before 8 o’clock, which meant…

_Bang! Bang! Bang!_

John’s voice sounded tinny through the door, faint and almost unintelligible. “Yo, Abby, rise and shine! It’s almost noon! Jackson needs you in Medical.”

_Noon?_

Abby couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept so late. Even on the Ark, the latest she’d managed to sleep had been eight or nine – noon was unheard of. Although she was still tired from her journey to Becca’s lab, which had been a treasure trove of information they sorely needed, she had been back for a day and a half. The exhaustion should have worn off by now.

Searching for a lie in her assistant’s words, Abby sought out the glowing face of Marcus’ alarm clock: it lay on his dresser next to a walkie talkie, which kept her in contact with him throughout the past few days. When she found it, she paled.

Not only was it noon – John was telling the truth – but the screen was flashing. His alarm had done its job. It had gone off at seven-thirty as it always had…but she had slept through it. She had slept through him radioing her at ten, too, a thought that swept hot currents of shame through her whole being.

Abby Griffin never slept through alarms, and she certainly never slept half the day away. With a pit in her stomach, she realized something must have gone wrong.

Taking a deep breath, she summoned her courage and answered John.

“I’m awake,” she said, sitting up and raising her voice as loud as she could despite her growing concern. “Tell Jackson I’m sorry. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

Opening her mouth seemed to have jump-started some kind of reaction inside her, and her stomach began to churn with more than just shame. Dizzy, she clutched the worn velvet of his comforter and swallowed hard, breathing deeply, colliding with a wave of unexpected nausea.

“Okay,” John responded, oblivious to her struggle.

Abby waited to hear the sound of his footsteps carrying him away from her thundering down the hall, then leaned over the side of his bed and vomited every morsel of last night’s dinner into the trash can.

The sound of the glop hitting steel was enough to stimulate her gag reflex even further, and she retched until her stomach was completely empty. Even then, after the deed was done, she ached.

Left alone, trembling, Abby took a moment to rest her head in her hands. She’d graduated to wearing one of his shirts while she slept – she was already sleeping in his room, she thought she might as well go all the way if she were going to do it – and right now, she was thankful for the softness of the fabric that brushed against her back, her arms, her torso. Without him here, it was the closest she could come to his embrace.

 _Something’s wrong,_ she thought, wishing she could say those words to him instead of his shirt. _And I don’t know what it is._

Her mind offered her an explanation she didn’t want to hear, so she did her best to drown it out. Nonetheless, she was a doctor and it insisted on making itself heard.

_Radiation. It’s radiation poisoning._

And if it was radiation poisoning – probably a side effect from going into that lab, although they’d tested the air and thought it was clear – there was a limit to what could be done for her. Unlike Luna, who had healed from the effects, Abby’s blood wouldn’t help her in this fight. There was a reason Luna had been the sole survivor from her clan, and she knew if this was anything similar, she might not even have six months. In all likelihood, her time would be less.

As much as she loved his penchant for diplomacy, his ever-insistent driving desire for peace, she needed Marcus more than ever. Though she knew he was needed in Polis, Roan respected him and his ability to maintain stability between the clans, Indra was keeping him safe…right now, she felt like curling into a ball inside his oversized gray t-shirt and sobbing.

She needed him, and she needed him now.

The coolness of his floor seemed to knock her off-balance, and her stomach flipped again. There was nothing left for it to expunge, but it tried anyway, leaving her gagging on open air.

After five minutes or so the nausea subsided and she was able to dress, leaving her with only her racing heart and a keen sense of dread. How long had it taken since Luna first got sick for her to be almost bested by the disease? A week? Two? Could she only have a week left with Clarke, Raven, the rest of the kids?

Could she only have a week left with him?

Fighting to keep herself calm, she reminded her spiraling thoughts that nothing had been proven yet. For every worry of radiation sickness, there was a common flu. The irony of getting sick with a regular disease when the world was sickening with a nuclear meltdown was not lost on her, and she managed a sad little smile as she opened and closed his door behind her.

She could practically hear John’s sarcasm: “The end of the world, and Doctor Griffin comes down with the flu.”

*** 

“It’s not the flu, Abby,” Jackson said, his voice gentle. It was the very end of the day – practically night – and he’d just received the results of her blood sample he’d taken earlier in the day. Mentally, she prepared for the worst.

“You should have me isolated,” she said, steeling her nerves. “We don’t know how contagious this is. Luna wasn’t, but it could be a new strain-“

“Abby, you’re not sick,” Jackson said. “It’s not radiation poisoning.”

His tone grew even softer, and she frowned. If it wasn’t the flu, and it wasn’t radiation, then what…

“If the results are right,” Jackson said, reaching out to hold her hand as she stood before him in the flickering lights of the Med Bay, “you have elevated levels of hcG. Which would mean, in theory, that you’re…”

He stopped, as if waiting for her to say the word.

“Pregnant,” she finished for him, dropping his hand, her lips forming the words as the rest of her body went numb.

It was impossible.

There was no way for her to have gotten pregnant with her contraceptive implant still in place, not to mention the unlikelihood of conception after the age of forty. She’d rarely known the implants to fail – after all, they were built with the express purpose of maintaining the Ark’s population, and the Ark was nothing if not precise. In over twenty years as a doctor, she’d only had one patient with that problem.

It was impossible.

“Jackson,” she stammered softly, feeling as though every ounce of breath had been stolen from her lungs, “how confident are you that…” she trailed off, knew he could guess the rest of her sentence.

He nodded, chin dipping slowly. “I can show you the results, if you want. But the numbers…they don’t lie.”

It was impossible.

If there was one thing she learned in her years as a doctor, numbers didn’t lie. They were dispassionate, unemotional, detached. They gave information no matter the emotional impact, no matter the detonator they set off when they were analyzed. Numbers had never lied to her.

But at the same time…it was an explanation. She’d felt queasy at times during her trip to Becca’s lab, but had explained it away as changes in radiation levels. Then, when she threw up this morning, she thought it could be the flu. Admittedly, both of those signs were symptoms of something else. She just hadn’t thought…

“How could this happen?” she asked, leaning against a cot for support. There was a ringing in her ears that hadn’t gone away since she’d said the word, her stomach churned, and her legs threatened to give out at any moment. “I haven’t had my implant removed.”

Jackson bit his lower lip. “I’m as confused as you are,” he said. “It looks like the implant failed. It’s rare, but when they were issued…it was a possibility.”

“A 0.01 percent chance,” Abby corrected him, tucking a strand of brown hair behind her ear and out of her eyes. “In medical terms, it’s next-to-nothing. Less than a rarity.”

“I know,” he admitted. “But did you…in Polis…I don’t mean to pry, Abby, but medically speaking, I need to know.”

She stared down at the ground, feeling a sob welling up inside her chest.

“Yes,” she said to the tiles. “We did.”

 _Repeatedly,_ she thought. If it had just been once, she would have had more cause to be skeptical of Jackson’s test results. But they’d treated those nine days like a honeymoon, because for all intents and purposes, that was what they were. It was the closest to peaceful bliss they’d ever come. It was their eye in the storm and they’d made that tiny room into a castle, a fortress that kept the rest of the world and its problems out while they fell deeper and deeper into emotional and physical intimacy. For those nine days it had just been her and him, exploring each other, finally consummating the thing that had gone unspoken between them for so long.

She’d been confident it wouldn’t happen, because it _couldn’t_ happen. So they hadn’t exactly taken precautions. They hadn’t been careful. With her implant, why would they need to be? Her love for him was stronger than any unfounded concern in the back of her head, and by then…at the moment they would have had to make that decision, she wanted to be as close to him as she could. Needless to say, a pregnancy had been the last thing on their minds.

“Oh,” Jackson said, quiet. “Then Abby, I don’t think – unless you really want me to run more tests, but the results were conclusive.”

“I understand,” she said. The room was spinning around her, and up was down and down was up and somehow impossible things could happen now, because she’d ended up pregnant with an implant expressly designed to prevent that from happening. “We can’t use any more of our resources. What’s done is done.”

Jackson nodded, swallowed hard. “You need to take it easy,” he said. “You can’t go on any more missions. From now on, you need to stay inside Arkadia where there’s medical equipment and we can be sure you’re eating well. Even though you’re only a few weeks in, we need to start taking precautions.“

Abby didn’t bother stating the obvious.

None of it – their precautions, her resting, eating well – would matter if they couldn’t figure out a way to stave off the impending nuclear doom. That thought, that singular realization, hit her like a punch in the chest.

Marcus might never meet his child.

“I’m going to help in every way I can,” Abby said, giving Jackson the determined glare she’d perfected over months of working with him on the Ark. He opened his mouth, prepared to contradict her, but she persisted. “I understand the limitations of pregnancy, Jackson. But I’m not going to stop working because of it. Please don’t ask that of me.”

In fact, she’d continue working _because_ of it.

Their child, growing inside her, deserved to see the world. They deserved to breathe the air on the ground, to hear the sounds of the birds chirping in the trees, to feel a warm summer breeze on their skin. They deserved to stand outside in a rainstorm and feel the icy droplets of rain on their skin. Earth was something both she and Marcus had never thought they’d see, and their child deserved to live on it. Her heart was soaring, racing, slamming against her ribcage at the thought of their child - her child - and the life she desperately wanted to give them. 

Their child would live on the ground.

“I won’t,” Jackson said, seemingly understanding her strengthened resolve. After a few moments, he asked the question she’d been dreading, a question she didn’t know how to answer or what to answer it with.

“Are you going to tell Kane?”

 _Not while he’s in Polis._ This was in-person news, face-to-face news. She needed to be able to see him when he learned he was going to be a father, register whether or not this revelation was welcome. Though she doubted he’d be upset – if anyone wished they’d been a father earlier in life, it was him – she hoped he’d be allowed to come home soon. This wasn’t news she wanted to sit with for another week.

“When he gets back,” she said, wondering how the hell she’d act like she was fine during their conversation tonight. He had a keen ability to tell when something was wrong with her: a sixth sense, as it were. It would take all her effort to put on a happy, normal façade and pretend nothing was amiss, and even then he might see through it.  “I’m not telling him over a radio.”

Jackson surprised her by smiling, a soft, sweet expression he reserved for quiet moments and great triumphs.

“I’m sure he’ll be happy about it,” he said, “considering how much he loves the kids.”

Then it was Abby’s turn to smile. There was no doubt in her mind that he’d be an excellent father: he’d had so much practice already. Under normal circumstances, she would have been nervous – but elated – to tell him. But now, with the end of the world barreling down on them, she hoped the news wouldn’t bring him more heartbreak than happiness. 

And yet, despite it all, there was one emotion she felt stronger than the rest, one emotion that overpowered all her doubt: hope.

“I’m sure he will, too.”


	2. Reunions

“Abby, you need to rest.”

Jackson’s suggestion was gentle but firm, pliable but backed with steel. As a doctor she knew there was truth to be found in it, and as an expecting mother she’d need to get her rest for both her health and her child’s. It had become obvious after Jackson’s tests that she’d no longer be adhering to her former “Chancellor Griffin” hours, burning the midnight oil until only smoke remained at the rosy dawn of a new day.

Yet she couldn’t force herself out of the med bay. Not yet.

“I’m fine, Jackson,” she insisted, eyeing the datapad in her hands. But her statement wasn’t quite strong enough to dispel her companion’s concern, nor was the yawn she tried to disguise only moments later helping convince him.

“ _Abby_ -“ he started, softening his tone even further, but she interrupted.

“Give me one more hour,” she said, marveling at the ludicrousness of her situation. Not only had she gotten pregnant despite her use of a contraceptive chip, but now she was arguing with her assistant, on Earth, to let her have more time in Medical. And on top of it all, they only had two months…

Her gaze trailed down to her mostly-flat stomach, and she swallowed hard, shoving the bleak thought from her head. They’d figure something out. There was still hope. And Luna’s blood had given them the beginning of an answer, a few pieces to a puzzle they had yet to fully solve.

“Fine,” Jackson said, resigned. “Doesn’t Kane usually radio you to say goodnight at midnight, though?”

Abby frowned, eyebrows drawing together as she stared at rows of black numbers against a blindingly white background. “How do you know about that?”

Jackson smiled. “Your mood improves around eleven forty-five every night, without fail. John said he heard you talking to him one morning, so I just assumed he contacts you before you go to sleep.”

“He does,” Abby said after a beat, wondering how she and Marcus could be so discreet and yet so obvious. Part of her thought that even if they could communicate telepathically, Arkadia would somehow find out about it. Their private lives were never really private.

Jackson seemed to read her mind. “Have you told him yet?”

For a moment, the room was filled with the low beeps and faint humming of machines. Abby’s tongue felt like lead in her mouth, her heart sinking lower and lower as if caught in a whirlpool.

“Not yet,” she said. “I didn’t hear from him today. If we had talked this morning, I would have asked if he knew when he was coming home.”

Jackson tapped his datapad a few times, the sound of his fingers colliding with the screen filling the silence between them. Abby swallowed hard. She wasn’t reading anything into Marcus’ lack of contact – Polis politics were fickle at best, and she knew he wouldn’t always be able to speak with her – but everything involving him was heightened now. Now he wasn’t just Marcus Kane, the man she loved. Now he was Marcus Kane, the man she loved and the _father of her child_.

And he didn’t know it yet. He was in Polis, going about his everyday negotiations and meetings and audiences with Roan, completely clueless about the new life growing inside her. The life they’d created. It felt wrong to keep him in the dark, to withhold that information from him, but Abby didn’t see another choice. Telling him over a walkie felt cold, impersonal, substituting radio waves for open air.

There was no denying it: at this point, all she had were bad options.

“You don’t know when he’s coming back,” Jackson said, as if shocked she didn’t have any information on his plans. She realized she’d become something of a wealth of information where Marcus Kane was concerned, not that anyone ever needed her to report on him. But in the past, before everything with the City of Light…now she could see it. Bellamy asking her when Kane’s next shift was. Raven telling her to tell him she’d been trying to find him. Gradually, like the slow onset of a rainstorm, she’d become Arkadia’s expert on the man who would become their Chancellor.

It seemed only natural, then, that she would know when he planned to return from Polis. Jackon’s surprise wasn’t unwarranted, though it did spur shockwaves of uneasiness that cycled through her entire body. Should she have known when he was coming back? Was there a reason he hadn’t told her? Could it all have been tied to his lack of communication this morning?

What if he was in danger? What if he hadn’t told her because he didn’t know himself, if he didn’t have a timeframe in mind?

Her discomfort must have been obvious, because she was pulled from her reverie by Jackson’s hand on her shoulder.

“Sorry, Abby,” he said. “I didn’t mean to-“

She shook her head. “You didn’t,” she said. “We just hadn’t talked about it. Most of what we discuss is about the next few months.”

 _And how much we miss each other,_ she thought but kept to herself. Truthfully, those were their most common conversation topics: radiation and yearning. While she knew it had been the right decision to come home from Polis – had it really been six weeks ago? – she couldn’t help the wave of melancholy that washed over her from time to time. Sleeping in his room was enough to wash away the tide, but nighttime made it rise again.

“If he radios tonight, are you going to tell him you’re leaving?” Jackson asked, his green eyes filled with empathy. _Leaving._ Going back to Becca’s lab, to the advanced machinery there. To the place that could run every test imaginable and then some: a building from Raven Reyes’ happiest dreams. Unfortunately, it was a boat ride and a five-hour trek from Arkadia.

Marcus wouldn’t be happy to hear that she was leaving again, although she knew he wouldn’t say anything to that effect. He’d let his few seconds of silence speak for him, then take a deep breath and tell her she was doing the right thing. That they’d figure out what to do next, and that Becca’s lab would help them in the process. That they needed her on the mission.

Then he’d tell her to be safe.

Then he’d tell her he missed her.

“I…” Abby started, taken aback by Jackson’s myriad of questions. He was chattier than usual tonight. “Yes,” she said, decisive. “I’m not going to leave Arkadia without letting him know.”

The machines started beeping – her datapad flashing along with the few computer monitors they had in their corner of Alpha. Jackson frowned, touched the screen a few times. No avail. His pointer finger prompted no response from behind the glass, and he sighed.

“The radiation must be interfering with the signal,” he said, leaning on the edge of the counter. It occurred to her, briefly, that she wasn’t the only one going through a difficult time. Perhaps the most that had been asked of Jackson was what he was being asked to do now: running tests on Luna’s blood to, hopefully, isolate which components made her recovery from the radiation possible. Then, if he was successful in that, their next step would be to attempt to replicate that serum and make it into an antidote that could be administered to their people and whomever else needed it – to put it into mass production.

And they had less than two months to get it done.

“Or it’s just frozen,” Abby said reassuringly, giving her assistant’s shoulder a gentle, quick squeeze. “This happened on the Ark, too.”

Defying every one of her expectations, Jackson laughed. “Remember the time we were running an analysis on oxygen levels and your system crashed?” he said, his face lighting at the memory. Abby grinned – at least her past embarrassment was giving him something else to think about. It had put a smile on his face, and she’d do her best to keep it there.

“Without Sinclair, I don’t know what I would have done. Jaha would have been furious,” she said. “Thank God he worked around the clock.”

 _Jaha. Sinclair._ Though one of them still lived, they both felt like echoes of a life neither Abby nor Jackson quite fully remembered. It felt as though space belonged to a version of themselves they couldn’t reconcile with the people they were now, pages from a history they were now long removed from. A bittersweet tragedy.

She glanced at the wall above the entrance to Medical, read the digits on the clock. _11:55._

Jackson caught her staring, followed her line of sight.

“Go home,” he urged her. “Kane might radio you. If there are any new developments, I’ll let you know.”

Briefly, she weighed the pros and cons. If she left now, she wouldn’t be able to continue their analysis. And they were close – at least with the technology available to them here – to isolating a few compounds unique to Luna’s blood. Without her, she hoped Jackson would still be able to manage the workload. He was good with numbers, but it was a tricky task.

On the other hand…Marcus might radio, and she hadn’t even begun to think about what she’d tell him. How do you tell the person you love that your reunion will be delayed, if not nonexistent?

_If you’re coming home in the next few days, I won’t be here. I’m sorry. I miss you so much._

There was another sentence she’d thought about adding on, a three-word behemoth they hadn’t yet spoken. She’d tried it on for size, of course. Thought it when she pulled his gray tee shirt on at night and curled up in the warmth of his covers, felt it simmering on the tip of her tongue when his voice crackled over the radio waves. It radiated from her every time he crossed her mind – which was often, constant, he was the antidote to the debilitating deflation and defeat swirling around them – and even Raven had called her out on it.

_You love him._

Part of her was more than confident he’d thought it too: just the way he’d looked at her in Polis made her wonder if he’d say it then. But neither of them had been able to summon the courage, and so they’d left it unspoken, letting it live in adoring gazes and nights spent in each other’s arms, memorizing each other’s bodies and savoring each other’s taste.

There was something to be said for not saying it yet, for knowing it without needing to have the concrete reassurance of those three syllables. And yet, with the new life growing inside her, part of her wanted to be selfish. Part of her, even if it was immature and she knew beyond an echo of a doubt how he felt, wanted to hear him say it.

With the heaviness of the thoughts in her head, she realized she’d forgotten to open her mouth. Jackson stared at her expectantly, the various monitors and datapads still flashing their error messages behind him.

“Okay,” she said, the word sweeping a resigned weariness through her. The admission seemed to give her body permission to feel every ounce of exhaustion that had plagued her throughout the day, and she realized she _ached_. Her body was sore, thrumming with fatigue, and Marcus’ bed sounded wonderful right now.

Pleased with her response, Jackson gave her a smile.

“I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” he said. “Emori’s planning to lead us to her boat at ten, but I can see if she’d be willing to push it back. If you need more rest.”

Jackson’s offer reminded her of the tightrope on which she and him were walking: as the only two people in Arkadia who had knowledge of her pregnancy, they were forced to make amends without alerting the rest of the group.

Or rather, Abby was forced to try to keep up her daily life – she wouldn’t ask anyone for sympathy or accommodation – and Jackson urged her to modify her tasks, adjust to her condition. He often tried to sneak her his daily rations, insisting he wasn’t hungry. He took on more and more responsibility in Medical as Marcus’ alarm clock proved inefficient in waking her at her normal hour. It would only be a matter of time, she thought, before the truth came out. Once she started showing, there would be no way around it.

Of one thing she was firmly convinced: Marcus and Clarke would know before the rest of Arkadia. She wouldn’t let them find out through a rumor, through a haze of speculation and awkward glances at her slowly-widening midsection. They deserved better, she thought, than that. It was simply a matter of finding the right words to tell them.

A task that was proving more difficult than she ever thought it could be.

“I’ll be ready to go at ten,” Abby said, banishing her doubts and worries to the far corner of her mind, along with her trepidations about their scant timeframe and various tests. “You don’t have to ask for extra time, Jackson.”

He gave her a nod of acknowledgement that spoke more clearly than his words ever could. In a gesture, he said it all.

_Someday, you’re going to have to tell them. Sooner rather than later._

As she turned to leave, departing after giving her assistant a goodnight hug, she brushed her fingers lightly against her stomach. The tiny, barely-existent bulge wouldn’t be noticeable to anyone casually observing her – or anyone carefully observing her, at least while clothed. In spite of the doomsday barreling down on them, her own deluge of worries and fears, she felt the corners of her lips twitch upward in a tiny smile.

How tiny, the life inside her.

How quickly she’d fallen in love.

 _Your daddy is coming home soon,_ she thought, reassuring the tiny being growing inside her. Now a little over five weeks old, by her calculations.   _And I know he’ll be excited to find out about you._

Hope, she reminded herself as she turned the doorknob and let herself into Marcus Kane’s bedroom and glanced at the clock (less than thirty seconds until midnight) was everything.

Midnight passed, and the radio on her – _his,_ technically – dresser never so much as crackled. She could hear rain pummeling against the roof of the station, wondered how many clean storms they had left before blackness overtook them. If the storm stretched to Polis, Abby hoped Marcus was inside and warm. Safe. Sleeping.

With the clock betraying her and the moonlight fading behind gray clouds, Abby Griffin curled up in the cloth that smelled like him, under his sheets, lay her head on his pillow, and wept. 

* * *

Abby was faintly aware of a light shining somewhere in the room, a brightness that burst through the haze of her slumber. In a sleep-addled fog, her brain assembled the pieces: she’d told Jackson to come get her if he thought she was in danger of sleeping through the arranged time for their departure, and in the past week knocking on her door hadn’t been enough to do the trick. Thankfully, they could still play this particular symptom off as exhaustion and stress, and her morning sickness…well, she dealt with it in private and as quietly as she could.

“Thank you, Jackson,” she mumbled sleepily, barely coherent. “I’ll be ready to leave soon. Tell Emori…”

Her sleepy lips fumbled the last few words, and she knew better than to think he’d been able to understand them. The sound of the door closing managed to break through her semi-consciousness, and she figured he’d gotten all the information he needed to take back to the rest of their group.

Sleep had evaded her for the better part of the night – a side effect of her despair at missing Marcus, and the now entirely possible delay of their reunion – and she rolled over slowly, her skin dry with the ghost of evaporated tears.

“Leave?” a voice that was definitely _not_ Jackson’s said from the foot of the bed. “I just got back.”

Her heart swelled in her chest, her lungs shrunk, her eyes snapped open.

“ _Marcus_?” she whispered, fully awake, sitting up, and firmly convinced she’d managed to trap herself in a dream. A beautiful dream, a dream more pleasant than any reality they’d so far endured, because in what world would the universe be so kind to her as to give her this gift? To send her the man she loved for one night before she left, to ensure their paths crossed if only for a few hours?

“Abby,” he said, her name a reverent sigh. She could barely see his features in the darkness, his silhouette more pronounced and convincing in shades of black.

Without thinking, her movements powered by instinct instead of thought, she threw back the covers on his bed and bridged the distance between them, propelling herself into his open arms.

He smelled so much better than his bedsheets, his embrace warmer than any of his shirts and more comforting than his comforter. If this was a dream, she thought, she didn’t want to wake up. But her dreams since the City of Light had never been this kind, this forgiving…and he was a pleasure reserved for reality, one of the only things that broke the darkness of the world and brought some light shining through.

“Marcus,” she whispered again, his name paradoxically buoyant and weighing on her lips. She wound her fingers through his hair and he held her tightly, both of them breathing unevenly at the outpouring of emotion between them. Her tears trailed from her cheeks down her neck and to bead on the fabric of his jacket, and his trembling hands pressed her as close as it was humanly possible to be. “You’re here,” she said. “You’re here.”

“I’m here,” he said softly, leaning away just enough to look at her. He brought his hand up to her cheek – that familiar sensation of calloused roughness from months of working in the fields that was smoothed by the gentleness of his touch – and stroked her skin, wiping away her tears. “I won’t leave you again.”

Abby beamed, her happiness completely weightless for a fractional moment in time. For a few seconds there was nothing but her and him, all secrets and future partings forgotten and banished to the dark corners of her memory. Her voice thick with emotion, she thought it a miracle that he could understand her. But he was Marcus, her Marcus, her diplomat and Chancellor, her leader and her love. Of course he understood.

“I was afraid,” she sniffled, “that I wouldn’t see you again.”

He grinned, unfettered joy shining in his teary eyes and gathering in the crinkles at their corners.

“I had those fears myself,” he said, recognizing the phrasing they’d used so long ago. When everything was different and the same: a different puzzle, the same story.

Of course back then, if someone had come up to her – Chancellor Griffin, then – and told her she would one day find comfort in Marcus Kane’s arms, be carrying his child, readily acknowledge that she loved him with every last piece of her heart that had been broken and repaired too many times to count…she would have told them they needed to see Jackson for a mental evaluation.

But there was an inevitability to it all when he slipped his fingers under her chin, bringing her lips to his in a soft, supple kiss. She wouldn’t have predicted it back then, but now it seemed as natural and vital to her as breathing. He was the gravity that tethered her to hope, to belief, to her everlasting insistence that everything would be all right in the end. Because even though the universe had taken so much from them, it had given them each other.

She couldn’t help feeling a little grateful, in spite of it all. The same world that was trying to destroy them was keeping them together, pushing them back to each other, guiding them back into each other’s arms.  

“You were sleeping here?” he asked after they broke apart, breathless, noticing the rumpled sheets and her choice of attire. Slightly embarrassed and feeling like a teenager again, a girl whose friend had exposed an embarrassing secret, she gave him a tiny nod.

“I missed you,” she said, hoping that sufficed as all the explanation he could ever need. Thankfully it did, and he didn’t pursue the subject any further.

Both of them weary and worn down, Abby knew there would be nothing tonight but discussion of the topics on her mind and, if everything went better than anticipated, maybe a few hours of sleep. Marcus didn’t attempt to make anything happen, choosing to let her lead the way to his bed and sit on the edge, watching as she swept her hair over her shoulder and motioned for him to join her. He turned on the light on his nightstand, sat down next to her only seconds later.

“Marcus, there’s something I need to tell you,” she said, acutely aware of the heat radiating from his thigh, the pinpricks of warmth from his fingers as they trailed up and down her arm.

Her stomach lurched as she realized how quickly it could all go away, if he decided this wasn’t something he wanted: how that warmth could vanish, that light snuffed out. It wasn’t a high probability, she thought, but…she hadn’t had a high probability of getting pregnant, either. In fact, if their lives were measured by whatever numerable “odds” were for or against them, every detail of their existence was unlikely.

They shouldn’t have survived the explosions on the Ark. They shouldn’t have made it to Earth. They _certainly_ shouldn’t have fallen in love. All of those things were statistical anomalies, variations in the steady pattern of life, asterisks in the larger report of the universe. And yet here she was, sitting on the edge of Marcus Kane’s bed with her hands in his, ready to defy the odds yet again.

“Are you all right?” he asked, sensing her apprehension. His concern was so evident and heartfelt, etched in every centimeter of his expression and his chocolate-brown eyes, that she almost started crying again. What had she done to deserve a love like this?

“I’m fine,” she reassured him, and he relaxed instantly. If she weren’t slowly succumbing to the flutters of nervousness in her chest, she would have found it amusing. His first assumption had also been hers. “I don’t…it’s not radiation sickness.”

“Good,” he said, pulling her closer. They shared a long moment of eye contact, in which she could tell he knew she hadn’t told him the whole truth. His gaze was understanding if confused, loving if questioning. He wouldn’t ask her for anything she couldn’t give, but he knew her well enough to know she wasn’t herself.

“You can tell me anything, Abby,” he said, sliding his hand down her arm to entwine their fingers. “Whatever’s on your mind.”

 _He has no idea_ , she thought. _No clue._

But at some point, those two words needed to be said. There was no point in delaying, in putting them off, in keeping the life inside her confined to the knowledge shared between her and Jackson.

Abby closed her eyes for a moment, etching every detail into her memory. The way he looked at her now, brown gaze overflowing with adoration. The soft, musky scent of him. The strength and comfort of his embrace, the certainty of home in his arms. Everything about him was a promise, to her: an oath that love wasn’t just once, that soulmates weren’t singular.

In case her next two words broke that promise, she needed to remember it had been real. That on some level, it had been kept. And in the end, perhaps once she’d mended her broken heart, she could see that was all that mattered.

“Marcus,” she started, her lungs constricting as she fought to keep her voice even, “I’m pregnant.”

Then, she waited.

His gaze went from calmly concerned to full-on shocked, his fingers stiffening in hers. Everything about the universe seemed to stop: the air seemed harder to breathe, the white noise of the room faded to a harsh silence, the rain falling gently outside stopped as she waited for him to say something, anything.

“I still don’t know how it happened,” she said, continuing to ramble as a default. It was better than the awkward silence while everything around them faded in and out of reality. “I started throwing up a few weeks ago, and Jackson ran some tests. It wasn’t radiation poisoning, which was what I assumed. I still had my implant in Polis, there was only a 0.05 percent chance…even on the Ark, they had one case. If you’re upset with me, I’ll understand.”

She trailed off, turned back to him again. Expecting the worst – after all, his silence wasn’t promising – she was caught off-guard when the silvery lamplight exposed his shaky smile, his shining eyes, the single tear traveling down his cheek and weaving its way through his salt-and-pepper beard.

Slowly, the knot in her heart untied. Her love, her _Marcus_ , knew what had happened. He knew she was pregnant, he knew what this meant for her, for him, for them – and he was _smiling_.

“Abby,” he whispered, sounding more incredulous than enraged or upset. “I didn’t…I never thought we could…”

He swallowed hard, his Addams apple bobbing in the hazy light filtering from between the blinds of his shades. And in that moment, Abby realized something she had never before considered: that Marcus Kane might _want_ to be a father. That this news wouldn’t be entirely unwelcome to him. That her pregnancy might not serve as an inconvenience, as a screeching halt to the progress they’d made in their relationship.

That maybe, this had been something he would never have told her he wanted, but that he desired just the same. That this had been a hole he filled almost completely with the kids – Bellamy, Octavia, Clarke – but there was still a corner of his heart that he’d left unlocked for that barely-there chance, for a thing he’d never ask of her. For something he long ago accepted he couldn’t have.

For that 0.05 percent.

Barely holding back her own tears, she leaned into his touch and sighed as his thumb traced along her cheekbone.

“I know,” she said, her voice wavering. “It goes against everything I learned about pregnancy, about contraceptive measures…it shouldn’t have happened. I’m an anomaly, Marcus.”

He stared at her for a long moment, the softness and devotion in his gaze sending a shiver down her spine. It was a wonder, she thought, that the sheer radiance of her joy hadn’t caused her to glow. Out of every scenario she’d considered, she hadn’t considered this.

He leaned in to give her a slow, soft kiss, equal parts chaste and intimate. She could feel the tears on his cheeks as he pulled her close, his hands trembling as he ran his fingers up and down her spine.

“You’re not an anomaly,” he said, quietly insistent, his words a husky whisper. “You’re beautiful.”

She felt a laugh bubble up from somewhere deep inside her soul, a noise so unbidden and giddy and weightless that it was hard to claim it as her own. There was still part of her that wondered if this could be a dream; after all, this felt like a kind of perfection too blissful for reality.

“Do we know if it’s a boy or a girl yet?” Marcus asked, his tone adopting a bright, electric giddiness that brought a grin to Abby’s lips. As much as she adored him, it was clear he had no knowledge of the medical field – or pregnancy, for that matter.

“No!” she said with a laugh, a giggle wet with tears and soaked in unfettered joy at his unfounded, absurd inquiry. _It’s a good thing one of us is a doctor._ “I think I’m a little over five weeks. We won’t know that until-“

And just like that, reality came barging into the room.

Under normal circumstances, the rest of her sentence would have been _eighteen weeks if we’re lucky, but with Clarke we found out by twenty._ Under normal circumstances she would have teased him about his lack of medical expertise, made a joke at his expense. Under normal circumstances he would have laughed along with her and commented about needing to be patient, pulled her close again, kissed her until their breaths came in unsteady, uneven gasps.

These were not normal circumstances.

Even if they got lucky and an ultrasound told them at eighteen weeks, that would still put them far beyond the scope of Raven’s two-month window. The rest of the world – or rather, the nuclear radiation – had become an unwelcome fourth member in the room, staring down at them and their unborn child with beady eyes and an imposing, unwelcome insult.

Marcus sensed her change in demeanor. “Abby,” he murmured, a promise burning in the intensity of his gaze. “Tell me when we’ll know.”

And she knew his insistence was more than an impatience, an excitement, a thing to cross off days on the calendar and bring a smile to his lips when the world was falling apart around them. Those five words – _tell me when we’ll know_ – were about so much more than the gender of their child. They were an oath of protection, a determined vow to build a future beyond the rapidly-approaching window of doom.

That somehow, some way, eighteen weeks would come and go and they’d have the right supplies, that she’d end up in Medical with him at her side, with him holding her hand, and Jackson would be able to do an ultrasound. That they’d hear the news and keep it to themselves for a few days, holding the rest of Arkadia in suspense – except for Clarke, of course – and then finally, when the tension became too much, they’d let it out.

With his request, he was promising her, them, their _child_ a future. Staring at him in the darkness, both of them bonded by a happy secret and a shared suspense, Abby felt more optimistic than she had in weeks.

“Eighteen weeks, if we’re lucky,” she said, swallowing hard, training her gaze on him as he tethered her to a future she forced herself to believe they had. “When I was pregnant with Clarke, we knew at twenty.”

His face fell a fraction, and she wondered if the rest of the world had begun to gnaw away at his happiness, too. But it was nothing more than a momentary slip, a flicker, a flash.

“I guess there’s nothing to do but wait,” he said, sounding vaguely disappointed. Her mood still ricocheting between bliss and despair, Abby allowed herself a smirk.

“It takes time,” she said. “We’re going to have to be patient.”

He nodded. “Do you…I mean, since you found out…do you have a guess? An idea?”

Abby frowned a tiny scowl, doing her best to remember her last pregnancy. With Clarke she hadn’t known until twenty weeks, but she’d told Jake she thought it would be a girl far earlier than that. Probably not _this_ early, but…somehow, since she’d found out, she’d had a strange inkling. An unfounded assumption, nothing she could medically prove, the kind of thing she’d just giggled at Marcus for saying aloud. And yet…

“I think it’s a girl,” she said, unsure where her conviction was coming from. Marcus smiled his sunshine smile, bright despite the storm outside, pressed a soft kiss to her forehead.

“Clarke’ll have a new baby sister, then,” he said, accepting her words as gospel. “She’ll like that.”

Abby stiffened, remembered this was yet another thing he’d missed over his nearly six weeks away. He read her body language like the pages of a novel, his expression shifting with the tone of the conversation.

“You haven’t told her,” he said. Abby shook her head.

“I wanted you to be the first to know,” she said. “Jackson knows, because he ran the tests. But other than him, there’s no one else. I’ll tell her when…”

She trailed off, now realizing reality’s intrusion had become more and more palpable. It screamed at them from the corner of the room, beamed through the breaks in the clouds outside. It was loud, insistent, brash, interrupting.

“Marcus, what I said when you first came in the room…” she started, struggling for the right words, “I’m supposed to leave again. Today. I’m going back to Becca’s lab, and I’m scheduled to stay until we have results on Luna’s blood. Until we can recreate Nightblood.”

Shock washed over him slowly, evident in his widening eyes and stiff posture.

“Abby, that lab’s in Azgeda territory,” he said.

She frowned, uncertain why this merited his change in mood.

“It’s on the outskirts,” she corrected him. “And it’s underground. Emori and Luna are sure it’s safe. And doesn’t Roan-”

“The alliance is broken,” he said, his tone quiet and resigned. “I told the guard as soon as I arrived. Roan no longer holds the throne.”

Abby stared at Marcus. Marcus stared at Abby.

In the quiet their eyes said all the things they couldn’t say, let the weight of his words wash over them as they realized the implications the fracturing would have. Suddenly, venturing to Becca’s lab had become a hundred times more dangerous.

And Abby knew Marcus understood she’d do it anyway. Because she had to, because it was her people’s best chance.

“It’s still on the outskirts,” Abby repeated. “And we’ll be well-protected. Nathan and his dad are coming with us.”

“And _I’m_ coming with you,” he said. “I need to be on that mission, Abby.”

Abby ripped her gaze from his, took a deep breath and blew it out slowly.

“Marcus, you’re the Chancellor,” she said, fighting to keep her voice steady. As much as she wanted him by her side – yearned for him to be in that lab with her, for him to keep her company at night when the darkness closed in and every noise felt loud, frightening, fearful – their people’s needs would always come before her own. “You’re more useful here.”

“They didn’t need me for six weeks,” he said, ready with a retort as soon as her words left her lips. “I won’t be missed. Clarke can lead them. She’s proven herself adept at motivating them, Abby. She can handle it.”

Abby shook her head. “She’s exhausted,” she said, “and our people want their Chancellor. You give them hope, Marcus. They need you.”

He was deathly quiet as he rubbed his brow with his left hand, blew out a frustrated sigh and held his head in his hands. When he turned back to her after what felt like an eternity, his eyes were shining.

“Abby…” he started, his voice shattering on the second syllable of her name. “I can’t do this again.”

Abby bit her lip as recognition sunk in: those words had been her own, not long ago. As she stared at him in the moonlight, she was relieved to find he wasn’t angry – she’d seen Marcus Kane angry, and this wasn’t it. Yet it wasn’t frustration, or fear, or sadness: she’d seen those too. After a beat, she realized what it was.

It was helplessness.

Once again, they’d be torn from each other’s arms by the ferocity of their duty, the extent of their devotion. As strongly as they were pulled toward each other they were propelled away by their professions, by the letters in front of their names that read ‘ _doctor’_ and ‘ _Chancellor_.’ And there it was – the world she knew, the world that was harsh and unforgiving and cruel – had returned to her again.

“I’m sorry,” Abby apologized, but Marcus shook his head.

“You have nothing to apologize for,” he said. “I…more than anything, I want to be with you. Being away from you for six weeks…” he stopped, stared at her with a devotion that blurred her vision with tears, “it was hell. And I can’t let you and our child go into Azgeda territory without the protection of the alliance.”

Abby bit her lip, the pressure of her teeth against her skin failing to drown out the pain in her chest. Everything, every decision, every move…it meant more than just her life, now. Her life was something she was willing to give for the good of her people, for the sake of their survival, and she knew Marcus would do the same. But it wasn’t just _her_ life.

“Marcus, I-“ she said, her voice breaking. “I need to do this. This is our people’s best chance. Without this, I don’t know what we’ll do to survive. Luna’s blood is our only defense, and our people can’t have their Chancellor leaving again.”

Nothing, it seemed, had stuck.

“Abby, I’m _begging_ you,” Marcus said. “Let me go with you. If you’re determined, let me stay by your side. You don’t have to do this alone.”

His words began fading halfway through his second sentence, his meaning apparent from the desperation in his deep brown eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, unsure if the words actually passed her lips or faded on her tongue. With the whole world crumbling around her and her heart splitting itself into smaller and smaller sections, exhaustion fracturing her resolve and despair conquering her hope, Abby Griffin did the only thing her body would let her do.

She cried.

Marcus held her close, guided her head to his shoulder and wrapped an arm around her back. She thought she felt his shoulders shaking as she buried her face his neck, as they moved together, slowly, lying back on the soft pillows of his bed. He murmured comforting phrases to her as the tears continued to flow, reassuring her that everything would be all right: promises he didn’t know if he could keep, and they both knew it. But at times like these, it was the thought – his hope – that counted.

After a few minutes of self-indulgent tears the waterworks turned to a slight drip and evaporated, leaving her pressed into his side and him idly stroking her sweat-soaked hair as her tears gathered in the wrinkles on his jacket.

“Marcus, I love you. I don’t want this,” she said, her words still on shaky ground with the aftershocks of her tears. “I don’t want us to be separated again. If there were any other way, I’d take it.”

His words were soft, lower than a whisper.

“I know. I love you more than anything.”

The humming of the station as they lay together, tangled in their mess of impossible problems and rising radiation. If she’d had any sense of humor left – which she didn’t, at least not then – she might have laughed at the sheer absurdity of it all.

A hell of a time to start a family.

“Sometimes,” Marcus said slowly over the white noise, seeming to fight tears of his own as he accepted their fate, “there is no other way, Abby.”

Tears threatened her again, but he kept talking. “But just because we don’t have another option…it doesn’t mean we can’t find a way to make this one work.”

Abby nodded, rolling over to look him in his red-rimmed eyes.

“We’ll still be able to communicate,” she offered, taking his hand, winding her fingers through his. “I won’t be out of range.”

“And you’ll tell me if anything goes wrong?” he asked, stroking the backside of her hand with his thumb. “Not just with Azgeda. If anything changes with you, if you’re feeling even a _little_ sick, you won’t hesitate to come home?”

“I won’t.”

He breathed a sigh of relief, his worries apparently assuaged by her verbal confirmation. She leaned into him again, listened to the sound of his heartbeat through the smooth leather of his coat, and dreaded the moment she’d have to pull away.

“I know what my mother would have said,” he said quietly, leaning away a little, bringing a hand to rest comfortingly on her thigh, “if we could have told her about this. About the baby.”

Abby smiled, angled her head so she could press a kiss to his lips.

“What?” she asked, genuinely curious. Vera’s religious adherence might have dictated Abby’s pregnancy as a sin – after all, she and Marcus didn’t have silver bands on their fingers to bond them to each other – but his tone wasn’t hesitant enough to make her think his conjecture was negative. And Vera had been such a sweet, kindly soul: she hardly thought Marcus’ mother would have shunned them or lashed out at him for their unexpected surprise.

“She would call it a miracle,” he said, the end of his sentence trembling.

“And what would you call it?” she asked, thinking she might already know the answer.

“Hope.”


	3. Discussions

Abby looked over at Jackson from across the white counter of Becca’s lab, craning her neck to get a good glimpse at him. Since they arrived on the island – or rather, since the drones attacked – he hadn’t been behaving the same toward her; he’d been courteous but short, kind but distant. Something was wrong, and for the life of her, she had no clue what could be bothering him.

His posture proved her right: he sat with his back straight, his fingers clashing with the datapad screen with more force than was strictly necessary. Her brain cycled through a thousand possible causes at once, rotating like a spinning top. _Did he and Raven have an argument? Is he unwilling to experiment with Luna? Did the drones scare him? Does he wish he were still at Arkadia?_

An angry Jackson was a Jackson wholly unfamiliar to her. Throughout their years of working together, she’d only seen him truly angered once: in the aftermath of her shocklashing. Any time before or since the closest he came was mild irritation, a few comments that landed and bounced and dissipated not long after they left his lips. The man sitting across from her was different than the man she knew, a stranger, and she had no idea how best to approach him.

Her stomach flipped, but for once she didn’t think she could chalk it up to pregnancy-induced nausea. Then, a new cause dawned on her, one that she thought might be a little more probable: _does he think I shouldn’t be here?_

That, she thought, was unfortunate but unavoidable. No matter where she went, she’d be in danger. If she stayed at Arkadia, she’d be in danger from black rain and radiation sickness. Here, the only danger had been the drones. Comparably, it was far safer here than remaining at home, where food was low and morale was slowly sinking lower.

There was no way in hell she wouldn’t be here, and she hoped her assistant would understand that. But sitting across from him like this – clearly upset about something – was impossible for her, his obvious emotions shattering the tranquility and excitement she’d felt upon entering the lab. She wouldn’t be comfortable here until she found out what was troubling him.

“Jackson?” she said, doing her best to keep her voice normal, flat, as though she hadn’t spent the past five minutes trying to figure out what Raven could have said to him to squelch his mood to the equivalent of dry dirt. “Is everything all right?”

He swallowed hard and looked away from his microscope, slid the datapad to the side a few inches so he could lean on the table.

“Abby, I…I’d like to talk to you about something,” he said, his tone falling somewhere between nervous and angry. _Oh._ “It’s about today. The drones.”

“I don’t think we have to worry about them,” she said, making a valiant effort to be reassuring. She often forgot she and her assistant hadn’t had the same number of brushes with death, and an experience like that might scar him but leave her only with a paper cut. “Raven reprogrammed them all. They’re harmless.”

“I’m not worried about them,” he corrected her. “I’m worried about you. About what happened with _you_ today.”

_Shit._

She’d been hoping with every fiber of her being that he wouldn’t bring it up. When she ran out in front of the drone to save him – rather, to distract it so he could be saved – she’d been acting on pure instinct, on a bold mixture of desperation and adrenaline. It hadn’t been responsible or practical, and there was a laundry list of reasons she shouldn’t have done it. For one thing, she was their best doctor. Both she and Jackson knew that, and they both understood there was no way to replace her.

And second…she was pregnant. Darting over rocks and between trees was something she might have felt nothing but justified in if her life was only her own, but now…now, with a second inside her, a child more dear to her than the breath in her lungs…it might have been more reckless than she’d given thought to. That was just the thing: she hadn’t been thinking. She’d been worried about her assistant and unsure how to solve the problem and frightened and emboldened and her feet moved before her brain could stop them.

“Abby, please don’t do that again,” Jackson said, his voice taking on a note of gentle pleading. “I don’t want you to sacrifice yourself for me. If anything happens…you have to let me go.”

Abby took a deep breath, counted to ten while she tried to think of something to say back to him. There was no way she’d be able to sit back and watch as killer drones aimed bullets at the man who’d been by her side for years. There was no way she could stand on the sidelines and just ‘let him go.’

“I wasn’t trying to sacrifice myself,” she said instead, opting for a safer response: one that might end the argument before it had a chance to begin. “I wasn’t intending to get shot, Jackson.”

“But you could have been,” he said, all pleading gone. “And I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if it happened.”

She was quiet, suddenly fighting a pang of guilt that had been growing in intensity since the drone clattered to the forest floor.

“Abby,” Jackson continued. “You have to survive this. And not just because you’re our best doctor. You and Kane – you’re giving us hope.”

So it _was_ about the pregnancy.

“Us? Have you told anyone?” she asked, immediately wondering how much Raven Reyes knew. And if Raven knew, then there was no telling who else might have found out. _Jackson, I know how you feel about her. But couldn’t you have kept this quiet?_

“No,” Jackson said, and Abby breathed a quiet sigh of relief. “But if you did…you and Kane would be giving them something to hope for. A sign that there’s supposed to be life after these next two months. I think it’d help people.”

“Or they’d say it was stupidity,” Abby said. “An unfortunate case of implant failure.”

“I don’t think so,” he countered. “Everyone knows how much you care about each other. For this to happen now, with everything else…I think they’d see it as a miracle.”

Abby stared at him, rummaging for words that lay in a jumbled knot on the tip of her tongue. That was almost exactly what Marcus had said the night she told him: that Vera would have said it was a miracle. Unfortunately, not everyone in Arkadia was as saintly as Vera Kane.

“I’ll think about it,” she said simply, hoping her tone would put the subject to rest. Jackson wasn’t quite done.

“It’s up to you if you want to break the news,” Jackson said. “But please, Abby, don’t step in front of any more drones for me.”

She wanted to say she couldn’t do that. She wanted to say she could. Her hand traced over her stomach, to the tiniest, barely-there bump that promised life after the world’s death.

Her lips remained shut, her gaze found the floor, and Jackson got the hint.

Apparently assuaged by letting the cause of his trepidation out into the open air, her assistant began rattling off his findings. He had isolated the elements they needed to synthesize the Nightblood, but he was having trouble getting them to bond: a difficulty he said they could tackle the next day, once they’d both gotten some sleep. Abby only heard half of his words, a topic that had been bothering her for the past few days steadily bubbling to the surface of her thoughts.

“Jackson,” she said. “Can I ask you something about the elements you found?”

“Of course,” he said. “I can tell you all of them, if you want.”

“I don’t need you to do that,” she said. “I just…would any of them…”

She took a deep breath and readied herself for what she was about to say, the implications that would rattle her world if the answer were affirmative.

“Would any of the ingredients be harmful to a fetus?”

Jackson appeared stunned by her question, his green eyes widening a fraction as her words tumbled across the table and seemed to smack him. He returned his gaze to the datapad screen, scrolling over and over again, his lips mouthing what she guessed were ingredients. After several minutes, he looked up at her with relief.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “None of the ones I’ve isolated tonight would cause side effects. If anything, it only makes it extremely likely your baby would be a nightblood.”

Abby felt her shoulders slump, a weight lifted.

“Thank you, Jackson,” she said, and she was treated to the sight of his familiar, and highly welcome, smile.

“You’re welcome.”

They worked on in silence for a while, only talking to ask each other to hand over slides and datapads. Raven stopped in for an hour, sitting on the ground level and working with one of the computers there. Abby looked down at her when she needed an energy boost, smiled when she thought of how far the girl had come. After so much suffering, she was truly in her element here.

A noise sounded from downstairs, shattering the tranquility of their workspace. She heard Raven talking but didn’t pay it much mind: they’d figured out early on that the computers were voice activated.

After a few moments, Raven yelled up to them.

“Hey, Abby! It’s Kane!”

An electric thrill ran through her whole body, warming her and leaving her cold all at once. Though they’d been together for a few months, her excitement at talking to him never seemed to stale. If there was one person she knew she could count on to listen to her, care for her, be there for her…it was Marcus Kane. Distance lay no claim on the intensity of her feelings.

Her cheeks reddened when she realized she’d forgotten to let him know she’d arrived at the lab. They had talked earlier in the day, promising each other they’d stay safe, and he had asked her to let him know when she made it to their destination. But so much had happened – so many obstacles had been placed in their path, and then the overwhelming enticement of the lab had rendered her common sense useless for a few hours as she pretended time wasn’t passing – in the shuffle, she’d lost her promise to the man she loved.

“I’ll be right down,” Abby said, her heart racing. She had made a promise and then broken it. Practically sprinting down the stairs, she stepped off the final rung with enough force to send shockwaves of pain radiating through her body. In five steps, she was at Raven’s desk.

“No, she’s here. She’s fine. She’s _fine_. Here, she can talk to you.”

Raven made a face, practically shoving the walkie into her hand.

“Your boyfriend was really worried about you,” she said, then turned back to her computer.

Abby clutched the walkie to her chest, holding in the button to let Marcus hear her voice.

“Marcus, it’s me. I’m okay.”

The voice on the other end was tight, as though his lungs hadn’t quite let him breathe fully for the whole day.

“Abby. Thank God.”

Hastily, she looked around for somewhere private. They’d found some sleeping quarters earlier that day – likely used by Becca’s team of scientists – but they were further underground and she didn’t want to risk losing the signal. Her gaze finally fell on a hallway in the far corner, and she decided walking down it would get her far enough away from Raven and Jackson that her words would evaporate before reaching their ears.

She walked away slowly as to not look desperate, knowing fully well that would result in merciless teasing from Raven later. But she couldn’t quite keep her steps casual, her breathing even. It was hard enough to be away from him again, but knowing how worried he’d been about her…her chest ached with guilt.

The hallway offered refuge enough, dimly-lit with the same scientific, glowing white light that bathed the rest of the compound. As soon as she reached the end of the corridor, she sunk to the ground and rested her back and head against the wall. Comfortable enough.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, hoping that starting their conversation off with an apology would be enough to salvage the rest of it. “It was a busy day, and we started running tests. But I should have remembered to contact you.”

The other end was quiet for a few moments, static rushing through on the other end. Then,

“I was worried about you.”

Abby leaned her head to rest against the walkie, laying one palm flat against the cool tile. The temperature gave her something else to focus on besides her fraying nerves.

“Were you in danger?” he asked, his voice coming through as a mixture of static and concern. Her heart leapt in her chest, and even the floor couldn’t save her now. Whether to lie and assuage his nerves, or to tell the truth and risk him being even further concerned…she felt sick.

“A little,” she said, memories of the drone and the forest and her boots on the rocks flooding back to her. Her heart began to pound with a resolute firmness, as if determined to fully return her to the moment where she might have perished. “We lost two of our men. Smith and Allen.”

Static, again.

“I wish I were with you.”

He sounded so broken, so directionless, that she wished she could step through the flimsy connection and pull him into her arms. He knew, of course, that she had to be here – that there was no other way – but that knowledge wouldn’t make it easier. Especially now that he understood the danger of the island, how death had breathed down her neck today.

“Me, too.”

They were quiet for a few moments, hearts filling with heaviness and longing.

“Everything’s okay now,” Abby said, desperate to make him understand she was out of danger. Arkadia couldn’t have their Chancellor serving as a man distracted, and Marcus couldn’t do his duty if his head and heart were with her instead of their people. “They were drones, and Raven reprogrammed them. They’re harmless.”

When he spoke again, he sounded relieved. “All right,” he said. “But you’re out of danger? You haven’t run into anything else?”

“No,” she said, relieved to be able to give him good news for once. “Inside the lab, everything’s fine. We’re making good progress.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” he said. She could hear a smile in his words, see the softness in his eyes. “And _you’re_ okay…?”

He hadn’t said the words, but his tone spoke them louder than he ever could have.

“I’ve thrown up once,” she said. She had meant it as a positive – after all, she’d been gone for two days – but Marcus, being Marcus, didn’t immediately view it that way.

“Have you talked to Jackson?” he asked, concern worming its way back through the tinny speakers. “He might be able to give you something for it. Abby, I’m so sorry, I should be there with-“

“It’s nothing to be worried about,” she reassured him, unable to keep a grin off her face. “Marcus, I had morning sickness when I was pregnant with Clarke, too. It was worse than this. I can handle an upset stomach from time to time.”

She heard his sigh of relief over the airwaves. “Oh. All right.”

Briefly, she wondered if she should have given him a heads-up on other symptoms she was likely to be experiencing as she progressed. Morning sickness wasn’t the only thing she’d encounter, and if he reacted to everything like he reacted to the news of her vomiting…Marcus Kane would likely spend the next eight months as a walking, frazzled ball of stress and tension.

Now wasn’t the time, she thought with chagrin. When they saw each other again, when he came to the lab, she could spend an evening briefing him on the various stages of pregnancy and the major side effects that came along with each one. She could imagine it now; laying next to him in bed, his arms securing her to his chest, telling him exactly what _not_ to panic over. _If I’m suddenly not sleeping, if I throw up in the morning, don’t run to Jackson._

“If anything feels wrong, I’ll let you know,” she said. Even with the flub today, she hoped he could still take her at her word. For now, everything felt fine – she even felt a little better than she had when she was at this stage with Clarke.

“And you’ll let Jackson know?”

“And I’ll let Jackson know.”

Relieved, he laid the subject to rest. “How’s the lab?”

Abby gave a true, wide smile. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “It’s so much better than anything we had on the Ark. Some of the technology…I’ve never seen it before. It’s just what we needed.”

“Good,” Marcus said. “Maybe we’ve been given a stroke of luck.”

“Don’t tempt fate,” she said, grinning. “You’re _inviting_ things to go bad.”

She heard him laugh, a sound that filled her heart with joy. “Or we’ve become so jaded we don’t believe they could go our way.”

Abby shrugged, then remembered he couldn’t see her. “I guess we’ll find out.”

She paused for a moment, waiting for him to respond. When he didn’t, she asked the next question that had been on her mind.

“How are things at home?” she asked.

Marcus understood what she was really asking, the words that lingered in the pause after her question.

“Clarke’s fine,” he said. “We’ve had a rough day, but it’s nothing we can’t manage.”

_A rough day?_

“What happened?”

Static, and she sensed he might be reluctant to answer. After all, he hadn’t freely offered up information about his life in the past few days.

“Well…the kids found out the Ark can only save 100 people,” he said slowly, as if sensing she’d need time to absorb the information. She did – her ears began ringing and sweat sprung to her palms. _Only 100?_

“Certainly there’s been a mistake,” she insisted. “I’m sure there’s a way we can keep everyone inside the station.”

“Abby…” he sighed. “The data was accurate. I looked it over myself, and Monty explained it to me. Clarke made a list of the people she would save, but-“

“Clarke made a _list_?” Abby snapped, raising her eyebrows as she stared into the white light flickering above her. Who did Clarke think she was, to play God in such a firm, decisive way? Why would she do that? How could she live with herself, saying certain of their people deserved to be saved and sentencing others to death?

“She did,” Marcus said, “but Abby, it doesn’t matter now. We aren’t-“

“Marcus, it does matter,” she snapped. “She can’t tell people their lives are worthless.”

“Abby,” he said, sounding just as exhausted as she felt. “She’s doing her best. What she had to do weighs on her. This wasn’t a choice she would have made if she saw any other way.”

Abby closed her eyes, willing the corridor to stop spinning and the ringing in her ears to cease. Clarke’s position as a leader had certainly forced her to make hard choices, but this…this felt like the bombing of TonDC all over again.

“I can’t believe she would do something like this,” she whispered, all the air feeling as though it’d been pressed from her lungs.

“Abby,” Marcus said, his voice soft even with the harshness of static blurred in. “There was no other way. It was a backup plan, and we won’t be using it. It wasn’t a choice she made for herself: it was a choice she made for her people.”

It occurred to her, fleetingly, that Marcus might understand her daughter better than she did at times. Though the idea of making a list made Abby want to vomit, Marcus appeared to see it as an awful necessity, a cross for the young leader of their people to bear. And now, apparently, the solution had been useless.

“You’re not using it?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “Thelonious convinced everyone to hold a lottery instead.”

Abby couldn’t even think about the lottery without her chest constricting, without her vision blurring at the edges. What if she were selected, but not him? What if Clarke didn’t get picked? How could she ever bear to say goodbye to the two most important people in her life?

“We won’t need to go through with it,” he reassured her. “The Nightblood will work. It worked for Luna, and it’ll work for the rest of us.”

More than anything, she wanted him beside her. Fully aware of how girlish and insecure she might sound, she let the question that had reverberated inside her with every beat of her heart fly free into the open air.

“Do you know when you’ll be able to come to the lab?”

He sighed – it translated as shuffling white noise. “I wanted to talk to you about that.”  
  


It wasn’t good news, then.

“Abby, I have to go back to Polis,” he said, effectively shattering her heart with a single sentence.

“Why?” she asked, doing her best to compress the lump in her throat. She knew he wouldn’t go back without good reason, but knowing their reunion would be pushed back even further – that she might not see him for weeks instead of days – it was enough to make saltwater cloud her gaze.

“Bellamy and his hunting party haven’t come back,” he said, “and they should have returned this afternoon. We aren’t experiencing any of the radiation symptoms, which leads me to believe-“

“Grounders,” Abby finished for him. “You think Azgeda took them?”

“I don’t know who might have them,” he said. “But Roan might be able to offer some guidance. Force the captors to give them back. We can’t do this without Bellamy.”

The edge in his voice didn’t escape her, and she was reminded that Bellamy Blake was much more than just a soldier to Marcus. He was the closest thing he had to a son, and not knowing where he was likely consumed him with worry and grief. Her yearning for him seemed petty now, unimportant: he needed to find Bellamy first.

“As soon as I’m back from Polis, I’ll go to you,” he said. “I promise. I want to be with you more than anything, but-“

“You need to find Bellamy,” she said, forcing her words to come out in a flat, even tone. “Marcus, I know how much he means to you.”

He was quiet for a few moments, and she wondered if there was something he wasn’t telling her. She was too tired to press him for details, but trusted him enough to give her what she needed to know.

“Abby, do you know how much _you_ mean to me?”

Taken aback by his directness, it took her a few moments to think of a suitable response. Her free hand drifted toward her belly again, and she rested it across her stomach as she spoke.

“Of course I do,” she said.

She heard his voice shaking even with the interference of static and distance, his words tugging her heart back toward Arkadia, through poisoned waters and dangerous forests.

“You mean everything to me,” he said. “Everything. And I can’t – being away from you, being away from our _child_ …I haven’t stopped thinking about you for a minute.”

Suddenly, she was thankful the hallway was empty and far away: this was exactly the kind of discussion that Raven would have mocked her for.

“I haven’t stopped thinking about you, either,” she admitted. “I miss you, Marcus.”

“I miss you too,” he breathed.

And suddenly it was too much.

The mental image of him sitting alone at the metal table in his room, Chancellor of a people who were terrified of the future and restless in the present, ambassador to a nation that had little love for Skaikru…a few tears dripped down her cheeks, and she took her finger off the button so he wouldn’t hear her sniffling.

They’d been so lucky, to get those nine days in Polis. Yet they’d been a blessing and a curse, a backhanded compliment, because they’d also allowed her to fall into a kind of routine they both knew couldn’t last. They’d let her live in a kind of beautiful, hazy dream, where there was nothing to come between them but the day’s few necessary duties. They’d let her fall asleep in his arms and savor the sound of his breathing, let her snuggle into the warmth of his skin and memorize the feel of him, the taste of him, the sound of his voice when he spoke words only meant for her to hear.

They were blessed, they were cursed, they were falling apart and holding each other together.

It was a beautiful nightmare in which they lived.

“Are you there?” he asked, and she wiped a few stray tears from her cheeks.

“Yes,” she said, not trusting herself to say more.

“I love you,” he said, and she noticed his voice shaking with more than just the unsteady connection. “And I’ll be with you as soon as I can. I promise.”

She nodded. “I know. I love you, too. Promise me you’ll stay safe in Polis, Marcus.”

That might have been a little hypocritical, she thought, coming from a woman who stared down a killer drone to keep her assistant safe. But there was no reason to worry Marcus about that now – not when Bellamy might be in danger.

“I will,” he said. “You stay safe, too.”

A loud noise sounded from his side of the conversation, and Abby jumped although she knew it was far away.

“What was that?” she asked, concerned.

“Thunder,” he said softly. “It’s a thunderstorm, but it’s not black rain. We’re okay here.”

He remembered the night it had rained in Polis, how frightening she found thunderstorms. Logically, she knew there was no reason for it – it wasn’t as though anything in the storm would hurt her – but thunder was loud, and there was never any warning it was coming, and she couldn’t prepare for it until it was there. It was like riding in the Rover; it was statistically unlikely that anything bad would happen, but there was always a nagging voice in the back of her head that filled her with doubt.

Thankfully, Marcus hadn’t used her irrational fears against her. He’d simply let her curl up with him in bed, gathered her close, stroked the smooth skin of her back and reassured her until the storm passed. Then, once it was over, she’d rolled on top of him and kissed him and kissed him and kissed him, poured every inch of her gratitude into the ferocity with which their mouths collided.

Her fingers twitched on the soft swell of her belly, and she smiled.

“Get some sleep, Marcus,” she insisted. “We can talk again tomorrow, once you’ve arrived in Polis.”

“I’ll radio you once I’m settled,” he said. “It’ll probably be around sunset.”

“All right,” she said, the corners of her lips turning upward into a tiny smile. “Good night, Chancellor Kane.”

She heard him chuckle again. “Good night, Doctor Griffin.”

And with that, the radio went silent.

Abby stared at it for a few moments longer, waiting for a correspondence she knew wasn’t coming. They’d talked plenty long enough, and it would do them both more good to return to their work than continuing to spend the evening with each other. And yet…the second his voice dissipated into the thin laboratory air, a hole opened in her chest.

She sighed, held the radio to her heart with one hand and placed the other over her belly.

Then she jumped, sensing movement at the end of the hallway.

“Who’s there?” she said, all her worst nightmares springing to life at the sight of a shadow shuffling around the corner of the corridor. Instead of retreating, as she hoped it might, the figure stepped into her view.

Only John.

Her shoulders slumped with relief as she took in the familiar sight of the boy, banished her dark fears to the back of her mind. There was no reason to be worried – for all they’d seen, the lab was safe. There were no phantom dangers lurking around the corners of hallways, waiting to snatch her in the shadows.

Her heart sunk as rapidly as it had risen, sinking lower as she took in the expression on his face. John regarded her with a mixture of surprise and a slow-dawning comprehension, his blue eyes betraying something he’d never admit was concern.

“How much did you hear?” she asked, thinking it best to get the most important question squared away first. If he knew, she’d need to swear him to secrecy. She and Marcus didn’t want this getting out – not that John would broadcast it around the lab or back to Arkadia – and they needed to take precautions to make sure this secret stayed just that. A secret.

John continued staring at her, his lips pulling into his trademark smirk.

“Enough,” he said simply, unmoving. Now it was Abby’s turn to stare, dropping the walkie to her side as she approached him.

“So, you heard that-“

“You got knocked up.”

Abby flinched at the callous term. Although it was true – she’d certainly done that – the expression felt offensive, carrying a negative connotation where she and Marcus considered her condition a blessing.

That said, she was in no mood to allow John Murphy into the innermost workings of her thoughts, in no condition to allow him access to her considerations about her condition. How she felt about the timing of their situation, she’d keep to herself. And the father of her child.

“I can trust your discretion, then,” Abby said, now only a few feet away. She paused at a respectable distance, resisted the urge to scream. She’d chosen this spot for its privacy, but apparently even in the lab nowhere was truly isolated. It felt as though no matter where she went, someone would be listening.

“You haven’t told people?” John asked, a note of surprise turning up the end of his sentence. It occurred to her, then, that John hadn’t entirely meant to eavesdrop. He’d _been_ eavesdropping, certainly, but there was every chance he’d stumbled upon a secret he hadn’t meant to hear.

And now, he was likely a reluctant holder of the information closest to her heart, entwined with her every heartbeat.

“Not yet,” Abby said, wishing she could speed up the process, get him to tell her he wouldn’t say anything and go about her night. Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to be a possibility.

“Holy shit,” John said. “You’re pregnant, Abby, and you haven’t even-“

“Keep your voice down,” she growled, hoping the hallway wasn’t echoing back into the lab’s main chambers.

John came closer, closing the distance between them. Instead of standing in front of her, he leaned against the polished white wall.

“Does anyone know?”

Abby bit her lip, sweat threatening to pry the walkie from her grip. “Jackson and Marcus. And now, you.”

“Not Clarke?”

“No.”

He was quiet, staring off in the direction of the central chamber. The place where Raven and Jackson still worked in quiet solitude, solving problems while Abby felt the weight of her own crushing her slim frame.

“What the hell.”

It was quite possibly the least expected thing he could have said, right after ‘I’m happy for you.’

“What?” she asked, cocking an eyebrow.

“You’re not gonna be able to keep this quiet forever.”

She clipped the walkie to the waistband of her pants, realizing it had come perilously close to falling from her fingers and shattering on the tile floor. When she looked back up at John, her gaze was steel.

“I know. But no one needs another distraction right now, John. I’m not telling everyone until we have a plan for our future, one we know will work. I’d appreciate if you did the same.”

He gave her a quick nod, and she felt her heartbeat slow to a steady, constant rhythm. For all the faults others saw in him, John Murphy had never been a bad kid. He’d found himself in horrible circumstances, emerged a product of the tragedies through which he had lived. But there was something genuine about him despite his history, something that convinced her he’d leave the secret where it best resided: between her, Marcus, and Jackson.

“You should tell Clarke,” he said abruptly, again taking her aback. What did John care about her personal life? Despite her reservations, she decided to humor him. “Come on, Abby. She’s your kid. You know her. She’ll be pretty pissed if she finds out you didn’t tell her right away.”

Abby gave a quiet, frustrated exhale. He had a point – Clarke would be offended if she found out Marcus and Jackson knew, but she hadn’t considered her daughter important enough to let her in on the news.

“I haven’t had time to have a talk with her about it,” Abby said. “Not to mention-“

She stopped, and John stared.

Her sentence had been going a place her brain had diverged from in mid-word, mixing _I’ve been a little busy_ with _we might not get to see her._ Where was this pessimism coming from, and how could she expunge it?

“I get it,” John said. And from the look in his eyes, the flicker of fear he submerged behind casual indifference, she could tell he did. After all, she wasn’t the only one who couldn’t stand the thought of losing someone important to her.

“Tell me you won’t spread this around, John,” she said. Her voice remained low, her gaze boring into his. “It’s important to Marcus and I that what you heard stays private.”

The smirk returned. “And that’s why you were talking about it in the middle of a hallway? Very private. Great choice.”

Abby glared at him, and he stiffened a little.

“Fine,” he said, sounding resigned. “I won’t tell anyone you got knocked up. Happy?”

She smiled, feeling as though she could hug him. “Yes,” she said. “That’s all I needed to hear.”

Abby felt ten pounds lighter as she turned to leave, shifting the walkie from her waistband back to her hand. _Crisis averted._ Her steps felt less weighty, as though gravity itself had relinquished its pull on her.

John stopped her by calling her name once she was halfway to the lab, freezing her in her tracks. He kept his voice quiet enough that his words wouldn’t reach the lab: they barely survived long enough to reach her ears.

“If I were you, I’d tell Clarke.”


	4. Quality Time

“Clarke,” Abby breathed into her daughter’s golden hair, smiling as she pulled her close.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered in return, her voice shaking.

The hydrazine.

Abby knew the loss of the barrel would make their journey more difficult – Raven had been planning to use every last drop of fuel – but right now, she didn’t want to think about it. Right now, her thoughts weren’t in space, her head wasn’t with the stars. Not when her heart had returned to her arms again.

“It’s okay,” Abby said, leaning away, keeping her hands on her daughter’s shoulders. “We’ll find a way.”

The lab quickly filled with spectators: John, Raven, Luna, Emori, Jackson. Each of them smiled at seeing Clarke again, although Raven’s expression was tainted with anger and, if Abby looked closely, pain.

The ordeal her brain had put her through had been enough to sap her energy for the better part of a day. Last time, it had only been a few hours. She’d looked at Abby in the aftermath as she lay limp and sweaty on the cot, her brown eyes churning with something they both knew she wouldn’t qualify with words.

Someday, if they didn’t figure out a solution, there would come a seizure she didn’t wake up from.

“Clarke!” Jackson exclaimed, the least reserved of the assembled group when it came to seeing her daughter again. He darted forward to give her a brief, tight hug, stealing her from Abby’s comforting touch. It warmed her heart to see a genuine smile grace Clarke’s face, replacing her usual concern; at least for now, she could be a girl excited to see her friends. The rest of the world, the catastrophes, the impending apocalypse…it could wait.

“It’s good to see you again,” Jackson continued. “We heard your trip wasn’t…” he trailed off, but the tone of his voice emphasized his meaning.

“We were attacked, but we got most of the barrels here,” Clarke said. Her voice was firm, resolute, but Abby could tell from the set of her shoulders and the stiffness of her back that regret weighed heavily on her. Raven avoided her gaze, keeping her eyes trained on Jackson. “By now, you all know we lost one.”

Murphy snorted. “Sounds about right.”

Clarke ignored him. “I know there are still ways we can land the rocket,” she said, still trying to connect with the mechanic hovering at the edge of their gathering. “We just have to try harder. Do more.”

Abby almost winced: Clarke didn’t know yet about Raven’s condition, but the mechanic certainly wasn’t taking kindly to her sentiment.

“Why don’t you run the simulations, Clarke?” Raven snapped. “If you’re so sure it can be done, why don’t _you_ spend five hours in a rocket with a program telling you the survival rate of your landing is goddamn _zero_?”

Her voice rose as she spoke, and she was stopped from screaming only by Luna’s gentle hand on her arm. Abby wondered how the girls had developed such a close friendship in the short amount of time they’d been together; only a few weeks ago, they were strangers. If they had more time, perhaps she might have asked. But now, such friendships were for her to admire and not to inquire.

“I know this isn’t easy,” Clarke said, her voice wavering. Raven’s outburst had rattled her, especially because she didn’t have the backstory behind it. “But I believe we can do this. Raven, I know you can. You’ve done much harder things.”

After a moment of silence, a deep breath, Raven relaxed and crossed her arms.

“Of course I can,” she said, leaning back against the white tabletop. “I’m awesome.”

And with that, she turned and strode purposefully back toward the simulator.

Raven’s departure seemed to bestow upon everyone the blessing to leave Abby and her daughter alone, and they dispersed back to their stations without further comment.

Clarke appeared relieved to be only in Abby’s company again: her voice seemed a little lighter, her blue eyes brighter.

“How long are you staying?” Abby asked, barely daring to hope. It was more than likely that this would be a quick visit, no more than a few nights, just for her to ensure everything was going according to schedule before she returned to Arkadia.

As much as she wanted her daughter close, Abby could understand: the majority of their people were there, and the island was safe. Clarke would put her priority with the highest number of those who needed saving.

“Long enough to be sure Raven can fly the rocket,” she said. Abby’s heart leapt before sinking just as rapidly – they needed to figure out how to pilot Becca’s spacecraft as quickly as possible. Just because Clarke was staying until they could be sure…it didn’t mean she’d be there for weeks. “I’m not leaving until we can be sure.”

Abby’s gaze wandered the room as she spoke, and without meaning to, her eyes fell on John as he sat at the top of the stairs. He looked from her to Clarke and back to her again, barely quirking an eyebrow before glancing away. To anyone else, the gesture would have seemed innocent enough. An observation.

Abby knew better.

Telling Clarke about her future sibling would have to wait until nightfall, at least. There were plenty of things that needed to be done on both of their ends; Clarke would want to check in with everyone and take stock of their progress, and Abby needed to check up on Luna. Their tasks would take them at least a few hours, which was a blessing in disguise.

After all, she hadn’t exactly had time to sit down and plan how she’d break the news.

To some extent, she knew Clarke approved of her relationship with Marcus. They’d never spent time talking about it, but when the rings disappeared from her neck and finger Clarke hadn’t breathed a word. Telling her she would no longer be an only child was life-changing in a completely different way – a foreign blend of excitement and trepidation – and Abby would only get one chance to break the news. She had to do it correctly.

Why did Marcus have to be back home? _He_ would have the right words, _he_ would know exactly how to phrase the thing she couldn’t quite wrap her tongue around. Breaking the news with him in the room – or at least in the same building – would have been so much easier. An assured comfort in case things went badly.

“Mom, are you all right?” Clarke asked, concern churning in her blue eyes. Startled back to reality by the sound of her voice, Abby almost jumped.

“I’m fine,” she reassured her. “I’m happy you’re staying, honey.”

A faint pounding pushed at her temples, barely enough to make her grit her teeth. Stress headaches were a fact of life now, another side effect of the end of the world.

Reassured, Clarke aimed another slow, knowing smile in Abby’s direction. In the bright light of Becca’s lab, Abby was struck by how young she looked; her face was devoid of her typical concerned frown, her skin shone smooth and radiant. She looked every inch the teenager she was supposed to be, while still carrying the world on her shoulders and inside her heart.

“Kane sends you his love,” she said.

Abby felt the corners of her lips turn upward as her heart moved in the opposite direction. Missing him grew harder and harder each day, and although the sound of his voice on the radio sanded down the sharp edges of longing…it wasn’t always enough to heal her scars. Being apart from him was verging on impossible: a hellacious necessity.

“And I send him mine,” she responded instinctively, flushed with warmth. They’d talk again tonight, that much she knew for certain. But returning the expression came as naturally as breathing, and leaving it open – unreciprocated – was unthinkable.

She just wished he were here to hear it. 

*** 

Hours later, after Jackson expelled her from the lab to get some rest, a quiet knocking sounded on Abby’s door. Even without seeing her guest, she knew it was Clarke. They hadn’t had a chance to discuss everything they wanted with the rest of the group looking on, and now, after divorcing their duty for the evening, they would finally be able to spend some time in each other’s company.

Her heart swelled in her chest, despite the annoying persistence of her headache. Moments like this – one-on-one time with her daughter – grew rarer and rarer, and she cherished every second she could spend not just as “Doctor Griffin” in her eyes, but as her mom.

Abby opened the door, and Clarke stepped inside with a tiny smile; an expression of genuine happiness she knew was reserved for only the group of people closest to her daughter’s guarded heart.

“I thought you might be sleeping,” she noted.

Abby’s smile matched her daughter’s. “I’ll sleep eventually,” she said, moving back toward her bed to sit on the edge. The lack of a table in the room meant the only suitable place to hold a conversation – unless they were standing – would be there, and she motioned for Clarke to join her on the sterile-white sheets. “One way or another.”

Clarke’s smile slipped, and Abby wondered if she’d said the wrong thing. That tiny moment was enough to shatter the mirage of casual family discussion, to take the glass orb of comfort and normalcy and send it careening toward the concrete floor. As much as she might have wanted to pretend this was a normal night, an everyday briefing with the person she loved most in the world…her secret made such fantasies impossible.

Clarke Griffin would soon be a big sister, and Abby wouldn’t let the conversation end without her knowing that truth. And from the way her stomach lurched when she thought about giving her the news…the sooner she could say it, the better. At least if she wanted to keep her dinner down.

“What happened with Raven?” she asked, eyebrows raised. Apparently, Abby wasn’t the only member of their group who was avoiding sleep. “I know she’s under a lot of pressure, but Murphy told me I should talk to you about it.”

Abby sighed. Of course the details needed to be explained – Clarke needed to know as much as possible about what they were doing – but with the weight of her secret nearly collapsing her small frame, she wished she could postpone the discussion.

The desperation and genuine concern in her daughter’s gaze told her no such delays would be possible, and Abby wouldn’t be so cruel as to keep her in suspense.

“Raven’s brain is…” she paused, trying to think of the best way to break the news.

‘Damaged’ made it sound like Raven was out of danger, when the opposite was true. ‘Collapsing’ wasn’t accurate, but _was_ heartbreaking and would be certain to invoke instant panic, not to mention a repeal of their plans to go into space. Eventually she settled on “deteriorating,” which was really no better.

Clarke stiffened. “That doesn’t make sense. How did she-“

“The EMP,” Abby interjected. “When she was brought out of the City of Light, the device triggered a destructive response in her brain.”

Her daughter looked at her for a long moment, concern morphing to a fear fragmented only by remorse. Abby had carefully avoided accusing her daughter of causing Raven’s condition – after all, she’d done the best with the materials she had, and there was no way for her to know what the device would cause. But it appeared her gentle, precise construction had been for naught: Clarke already blamed herself from the moment Abby’s words left her lips.

“Is there any way to stop it?” Clarke asked, her voice low and soft.

“We’re not sure,” Abby responded. There was no way she’d tell her daughter that as far as they knew, the damage was irreversible. That would be another weight on her shoulders that she’d carry with her, along with the fears of their people and the daily pressure the world thrust upon her. Raven’s condition, she thought, was enough for a doctor to carry.

After looking away for a few seconds, burying her gaze in the off-white walls of Abby’s room, Clarke turned back to her with something resembling panic.

“Mom…Raven wasn’t the only one we-“

“I know,” Abby said, effectively halting the flow of her words. She knew where the sentence was going; _we used the EMP on you, too._ And it had occurred to her, on seeing Raven’s side effects, that she might be affected as well. The doctor inside her – and for that matter, Jackson – had claimed there was a high likelihood she’d develop the same signs and symptoms, but as of yet, she hadn’t. No hallucinations, no nausea (at least, of the non-pregnancy related variety), no seizures. For now, minus the headache that mirrored the ones she’d had on the daily in Medical, she was fine.

“If anything was wrong, you’d tell Jackson,” Clarke breathed, staring at her as though she might be able to read her mind if she looked deeply enough into her mother’s eyes. “Right?”

_If anything was wrong, I wouldn’t put the baby in danger._

She’d be reluctant to tell anyone, to draw attention to herself instead of the multitude of problems they faced, but she had to give her and Marcus’ child its best chance. Ignoring her symptoms would be nothing but harmful, and she couldn’t let hurt descend on something so dear to her heart.

Not for the first time, she reminded herself that nothing _was_ wrong. She wasn’t Raven, and the EMP had already shown effects in her that weren’t related to her brain. She’d come to firmly believe the shock had fried her implant: thus, giving her the ability to get pregnant again. Raven hadn’t yet had a child, so she wouldn’t have one yet – not that it explained the effects on her mind, but…

“Mom,” Clarke said, stern, jolting her from her thoughts. “Answer me.”

Her gaze was pleading, and Abby realized her answer was too interconnected with her secret to disentangle them. This was it: the moment she’d been both waiting for and dreading.

“Clarke, of course I would. I couldn’t risk…” she stopped, took a deep breath, found her daughter’s blue eyes in the yellow-tinted light. This was the moment that would change everything: molding their relationship forever around a single, undeniable fact. This was the moment she’d remember for the rest of her life, along with everything that happened afterward.

There was no going back, now. Her sentence knew how it wanted to end and pushed her to travel there, moving her tongue and her lips only half of her own accord.

“The baby.”

Her daughter’s eyes widened, her lips parting in a show of barely-contained shock. Much to Abby’s relief, she didn’t register rage; just an instantaneous, building confusion.

“What?” Clarke repeated, her voice barely a whisper.

“I’m pregnant, honey.”

“Mom…” Clarke trailed off, confusion slowly morphing into understanding as she realized what, exactly, it was that Abby couldn’t risk.

It was a lot to take in, she knew. Abby had long ago accepted her implant failure, adapted to the idea of carrying a child for seven more months and bringing her – and Marcus’ – baby into the world. But that had been a process of adjustment that took her days, and she could hardly expect her daughter to stabilize in a few seconds.

“How?” Clarke asked. “I thought you-“

“Implant failure,” Abby interrupted, arriving at the end of her sentence before her lips made it there. Only logical, that her daughter’s thoughts would follow the same path her own had trod.

Clarke shook her head, perhaps a bit too forcefully. “The implants were designed to make sure no one got pregnant,” she said, reciting what she remembered from her days on the Ark. “They’re not supposed to fail.”

In schools and hallways in space, implants had been no secret – they weren’t a form of birth control available to the public at large, and they were expensive enough that not everyone could afford them. But for nosy schoolchildren with access to Medical textbooks, they _were_ eventually discovered as the reason no one had siblings.

“No,” Abby said, “they’re not. But implant failures did happen, honey. They were rare, but they happened. Even on the Ark.”

Clarke’s gaze softened, and Abby realized they were both thinking the same thing: at least on Earth, provided the radiation didn’t wipe them out in the next several weeks, she and Marcus would be able to keep the baby. On the Ark, they would have likely been forced to give the child up for adoption. If no family without a child was keen on another mouth to feed…the Council had never run into such a scenario. But Abby imagined the discussion – and whatever solutions they managed to cobble together – would have been far from pleasant.

Her brain provided her with gruesome images of their child coming of age in a cold Skybox cell, their baby growing up never knowing its parents. Octavia Blake had been punished for the sin of being born, and in all likelihood, Thelonious would have given their child a similar fate. That, she thought, might have been enough to shatter her and Marcus both. Their combined strength only extended so far.

Thankfully, down here, all they had to worry about was black rain, radiation, and rockets. In comparison, she thought, perhaps it wasn’t so bad after all.

Clarke was deathly quiet, staring at the cream-colored wall opposite them. More than anything, Abby wished she could plead with her, beg her to say something. Typically silences between them were comfortable: now, they were excruciating.

“Honey, if you’re mad at me-“

She sighed, searching for the second half of a sentence that wasn’t there. _If you’re mad at me…_ then, what? Should she apologize? _Could_ she apologize? Abby was already bonded to the being growing inside of her, and apologizing for its existence felt wrong. She wasn’t sorry she’d gotten pregnant. The timing could have been better, but that was just the thing – for as long as they’d been on Earth, the timing had never been right. This might have been something she and Marcus hadn’t realized they wanted – at least not consciously – but now that they had it, they’d fight for it until their dying breaths.

“Why would I be mad at you?” Clarke asked, a note of bemused, bewildered humor in her voice. “I-I wasn't expecting it."

Relieved, Abby felt tension drain from her muscles. “I know,” she admitted. “It wasn’t an easy thing to find out, either.”

Shock dawned on her daughter’s face. “You weren’t sure?”

“Not in the beginning,” Abby said. “At first I thought it was radiation poisoning.”

Clarke nodded. “You wouldn’t assume implant failure.”

Abby backtracked through the process, figuring she owed her daughter at least an amended explanation of how she’d ended up with the knowledge of her pregnancy. She omitted certain details, of course, but the gist of the story was the same; she’d woken up one morning later than usual, thrown up, told Jackson out of concern she had developed something contagious, and gotten a result that knocked her entire world from its axis.

Throughout the tale Clarke listened intently, never breaking eye contact. It occurred to her that this was the most time they’d spent together since the start of Praimfiya – the longest they’d gone without talking about the end of the world or Nightblood or rockets. The realization sent shockwaves of emotion coursing through her, raising that familiar lump in her throat, and she was reminded of Jackson’s words.

_You’d give them something to hope for._

Abby stopped after Jackson’s “diagnosis,” but Clarke seemed to want more.

“Have you told him yet?” she asked. “Kane?”

“Yes,” Abby said. “I told him when he came back from Polis.”

For her part, Clarke didn’t appear offended that she hadn’t been told right away. Abby knew her daughter was nothing if not logical, and telling her before the father of her child wouldn’t have made much sense.

She could see the gears in her daughter’s head turning in the low light as she pieced together the rest of the puzzle, realized Marcus must have taken it well if he still told her to give Abby his love.

“He’s okay with it,” she said, a statement instead of a question.

Abby smiled, remembering that night – the last she’d spent with him in weeks. Her heart swelled in her chest as she again smelled the scent of him, felt his lips in her hair and on her skin. She’d been as scared of losing him then as she was ready for the future now.

“It was a shock at first,” she said, “but he’s happy. This was something we never thought we’d be able to do. We hadn’t even talked about it.”

Clarke gave her a long, measured look, let the open air around them dissolve Abby’s words. There was no point in delaying it further: Abby had to ask.

“Clarke, I have to know. I know you weren’t expecting this, and neither were we, but-“

Abby’s question was cut short by her daughter’s arms pulling her close, the familiar sensation of her forehead resting on her shoulder. She angled herself on the edge of the bed to pull her daughter close, the sound of sobs landing heavy in her heart. Were these happy tears?

Her daughter’s hands shook on her back, and Abby felt the heat of her trembling fingertips against her shirt. Tiny droplets of saltwater slipped between her shirt and her skin, fusing the material to her. Since there was nothing more she could do, Abby held her daughter as she cried and waited, her heart pounding, for an explanation.

Eventually Clarke leaned away, wiped her red-rimmed eyes, sighed a gentle huff and smiled.

“I never told you,” she said, her voice shaky as her blue gaze grew distant with the onset of an old memory. “I never even told Dad. But the books I read when I was little…a lot of the characters had siblings.”

Abby nodded, remembering the awkwardness that came with reading those books to her. She had often wondered, perched on the side of her daughter’s bed with a storybook in had, whether her baby girl might have wanted a sister or a brother. If things had been different, if she hadn’t been required to have something inside her that made it impossible…would she and Jake have tried again?

They hadn’t even discussed it.

The Ark’s laws – and science – made a second conception both impossible and illegal. But Abby had always noticed his silence after reading those books to her, a shadow dulling his good humor as he climbed into bed and kissed her goodnight. Now, looking back, she could see it more clearly than she had at the time: if he’d had the choice, Jake Griffin would have had more than just one child.

Clarke kept talking, derailing her own trip down memory lane. “I used to wonder why I didn’t have one,” she said, “when I was little and I didn’t understand. And one year, for my birthday, I almost asked for…but somehow, I knew you couldn’t-”

Her voice broke, and Abby gathered her close. Tears slipped down her cheeks and into Clarke’s hair, realizing suddenly that her pregnancy wasn’t a burden on her daughter. It wasn’t something she despised. Clarke wouldn’t look at her with scorn when their child was born, her blue gaze hiding a hurricane of muted anger: _why would you and Kane do this now?_

Instead, Abby Griffin was giving her daughter a gift for which she had known, even as a child, it was impossible to ask.

Minutes dissolved into an hour as mother and daughter held each other, yearning for a comfort for which they hadn’t known they’d been starved. Eventually, Clarke’s radio shattered the tranquility: Bellamy needed to talk to her. The girl leaned away reluctantly, a question in her eyes. Abby knew that if she said she wanted Clarke to stay, she’d tell Bellamy to wait a few more minutes.

Abby wouldn’t ask that of her.

“Go ahead,” she said, giving her daughter a tiny nod. “He needs you.”

Clarke gave her mom a shaky smile. “Thank you,” she said. A deep breath evened out the tremor in her words, and when she spoke again she resembled the Clarke Griffin her people knew: the leader they admired instead of the girl who had spent the better part of an hour in her mother’s arms.

“You and Kane don’t want people to know,” she said. Again, a statement instead of a question. She’d already made the conclusion.

“Not yet,” Abby said, a rush of warmth sweeping through her as she realized how well her daughter knew not only her, but the man she loved. “We’ll tell people eventually, but for now we need to focus on the problems at hand.”

A dip of her chin – she agreed. Clarke held the radio firmly in her grip, told Bellamy she’d only be a couple minutes longer. Abby rose to tell her goodbye for the night, and again, Clarke wrapped her arms around her.

Abby smiled. Such outward displays of affection were unusual, but not unwelcome. And under the context of the information she’d just shared…perhaps they were more than merited.

Clarke leaned away with a glint of humor in her eyes. “That one’s not from me,” she said, a corner of her pink lips quirking upward. Playing along, Abby raised an eyebrow. “I was asked to give it to you.”

“Oh?” she said. “Who’s it from, then?”

She had a feeling she already knew.

***

The hours seemed to slow to a crawl as night wore on. She tried to go back to the lab, seeing as rest found her repugnant. Jackson insisted she return to her room, although she’d retorted that she wasn’t tired; with the blistering headache she’d developed, sleep was out of the question. Clarke had been conferencing with John, Emori and Raven for a while and had now gone to sleep. For all intents and purposes, the only conscious life in the building belonged to her and her assistant.

There was nothing to do but wait for sleep to find her, and there was nothing to help her eyelids close. If she’d been at home, she thought, it would have been exponentially easier to drift off. Marcus snored a bit in his sleep – it wasn’t deafening, but it was noticeable – a quiet rumble that made her eyelids heavy. That, combined with the warmth of him, the scent of him, the protective pressure of his arms around her…she’d fall asleep in no time.

But there was no Marcus Kane in her bed. Here, the sheets were cold, the walls were white, and the air was icy. There were no candles or furs, there were no paintings or bookcases. Truthfully, she felt more comfortable in the lab: at least there, she felt as though she were being useful. Doing her job. Helping. Here, her doubts ate acid holes in her brain, screaming at her to get up and stop wasting the limited time they had on something as trivial as rest.

The spiral finally stopped when a rush of static sounded over her radio.

“Abby?” Marcus said, although the rest of his words were eclipsed by harsh white noise. Snatching the radio off her nightstand, Abby made for the door to see if the hallway would give her better reception.

“Marcus,” she said with a smile; even if the world was collapsing around them, Abby thought she could build a home in the sound of his voice. “How are things at home?”

The hallway indeed brought clarity to his words, and she managed to hear the rest of their conversation without difficulty.

“We had our first round of black rain today,” he said, and as quickly as her mood had risen, it sunk.

“Was anyone hurt?” she asked. All of their doctors – Clarke included – were on the island now. If anyone had been injured and she couldn’t help them…she already felt guilt gnawing at the edges of her stomach.

“Thankfully, no,” he said. “The worst we’ve had is some minor radiation burns – they’re not life-threatening. We’ve been inside for the past six hours. The storm hasn’t let up.”

He sounded awfully morose for a man who insisted there had been no casualties.

“Are you all right?” she asked, voicing the question that typically came from his lips. The quiet on the other end made her heart lurch, and beads of sweat prickled her palms.

“Octavia left,” he said softly. “She didn’t say where she was going. After we released the boy, she just…”

He took a deep breath and didn’t say anything else.

Abby now understood his pain. This wasn’t just about the black rain, about being crammed inside Alpha Station with hundreds of their people. This was about the girl who was his daughter in every way but blood, a girl who was out there in the forest, unprotected, as black rain poured from the sky.

“She’ll be all right,” Abby reassured him, genuinely believing it. While a flare of temper simmered in her chest – how many times would Octavia put those who cared about her most through hell? – she knew the girl was smart enough to find shelter when the rain came. Octavia Blake was more than a warrior: she was a _fighter_.

“I should have gone after her,” Marcus said. “Bellamy left in a hazmat suit a few hours ago, but he came back without her.”

_So that’s what the call to Clarke was about._

“She’s out there by herself, Abby, and if Azgeda finds her-“

“They won’t,” Abby insisted. “She probably went to find Indra, Marcus.”

Quiet, for a beat – it seemed he’d been too panicked to consider that suggestion before she herself had said it.

“Even so,” he said, a bit of the darkness extinguished from his tone, “I wish she would have told me where she was going. I know she doesn’t want to be around Bellamy, but not knowing if she’s safe...”

He trailed off, and the tremor in his voice nearly shattered her heart.

She thought about all the times she hadn’t known whether Clarke was safe. The ground, Mount Weather, the three months without her, the entire time she’d been chipped…at times it seemed loving the kids meant never having a guarantee of their safety, no matter how much protection they tried to offer.

“Octavia knows about the black rain,” Abby said, doing everything in her power to ease his pain. “She wouldn’t have left Arkadia without having a backup plan in place.”

He sighed, a gentle, broken thing that Abby wished she were close enough to him to mend. To cradle his head against her chest and run her fingers through his hair, to show him that he didn’t have to be Chancellor Kane for her. That with her, he could let the walls of decorum and propriety tumble down; with her, he could just be Marcus.

“Did Clarke make it to the lab?” he asked, apparently in need of a subject change.

“She did,” Abby said. “They lost a barrel of hydrazine on the way.”

“Bellamy told me,” Marcus said – Abby had forgotten Bellamy had gone on the trip, too. “Do you think Raven can still fly the rocket?”

“I think she’ll find a way,” Abby said, doing her best to sound optimistic. _If she doesn’t, I don’t know what we’ll do._

They were both quiet for a few moments, crumbling under the weight of bad news. Then, desperate to give him something hopeful to hold on to, Abby decided to tell him.

“I told Clarke,” she blurted. “About the baby.”

“How did she…” Marcus started, then trailed off. “Was she upset?”

Abby beamed, her smile filtering through her words. “No,” she said. “It was a lot for her to handle, at first, but…she’s excited about having a sibling. She told me she always wanted one, even on the Ark.”

Just as she knew Marcus had been able to hear her smile, she could hear his.

“Good,” he said, his tone warm enough to fend off the faint chill in the hallway, smoothing the goosebumps that had risen on her arms. “I’m happy you told her.”

“Me, too,” Abby said. “She deserved to know.”

A clap of thunder sounded over the radio, and she winced. Thunderstorms were horrid at best – she had never really acclimated to them, to the bright flashes of lightning and the deafening booming that left her breathless and, for no real reason, terrified – but knowing that the rain was toxic made them even worse.

Every part of her ached for Marcus to come to the island, to join them in the lab. It was selfish, she knew, but there was no denying her emotions. The thought of him there, in a rusted, half melted ship, with black rain pouring down around him was almost too much for her to bear. At least here, he’d be safe from the elements.

“You’re quiet,” he observed, and she chose the next most probable excuse for her silence. There was no way she’d tell him what she’d really been thinking: they both knew it was impossible, and it would only serve to stoke the monster of guilt that had been awoken from hibernation in both of their chests.

“I’ve had a headache for most of today,” she admitted. Her head responded as though it had been aggravated by her complaint, and a drumbeat of pulsating pain radiated from her temples. “It’s stress-related. I used to get them on the Ark all the time.”

She neglected to mention that at least half of those headaches had been because of him. Now, the thought brought a bemused smirk to her lips. What she would have given to have this headache be because of him, too: at least he would be close.

“Is there any medicine in the lab?” Marcus asked. “You should take something. Abby, I know you don’t want to, but-“

“I’m fine,” she said as another wave of throbbing radiated throughout her head. Marcus had been enough to keep the pain at bay for a few minutes, but it was coming back stronger. “It’ll be gone in the morning.”

“You should get some rest,” he suggested. “If you won’t take medicine for it-“

“I won’t.”

“Then you should go to sleep,” he finished. “Everything’s fine here, for now. I’ll radio you to let you know if anything changes.”

Abby nodded, sensing their conversation was at its end.

“I’ll try,” she said, hoping the sledgehammer pounding would pause itself for long enough that she could close her eyes.

“I lo-“ he started, but static broke through again with another blaring clap of thunder.

“Marcus?” she said.

Static answered her.

Abby waited for a few minutes more, sitting in the middle of the hallway with the radio in her hand, willing it to part the noise and let her hear the voice of the man she loved. No such luck.

“I love you too,” she said into the radio. Even if he couldn’t hear it, she needed to say it.

Resigned and no less worried than she’d been before, Abby trudged back to her room and closed the door. She lay the radio on her bedside table, positioning it the way it had sat before, and slipped beneath the soft sheets of the bed. ‘Horizontal’ was not a good direction for her head, and the moment she touched the pillow a firestorm of pain descended upon her.

Gasping for air as she sat up, ripping the sheets from the sides of the bed where they’d been carefully tucked in the morning before, she missed the knock on the door the first time it happened.

The second, third, and fourth managed to work their way through the haze of her pain.

_Thud! Thud! Thud!_

It had to be Jackson, she thought. Jackson was the only one awake at this hour. She allowed herself some optimism, believed he might have decided he needed her help after all. It would be good for her, she thought, to at least be useful if her head forced her to stay awake.

Slowly, she slid out of bed and made her way toward the door. Abby pulled it open in one fluid motion, waiting to see her assistant’s dark hair and dark eyes, waiting for him to tell her to get dressed and come to the lab.

Instead, she saw Clarke.

Or rather, it was Clarke but it wasn’t Clarke; the girl in front of her wore the same outfit her daughter had worn earlier in the day, before she’d changed into a dark shirt and jeans she’d found discarded in the lab.

That wasn’t the only difference between her appearance and the girl she knew to be her daughter: this Clarke had swollen lesions across her face – radiation burns scarring her cheeks, swelling her blinded eyes nearly shut.

Abby’s heart stopped in her chest as she reached forward to touch her, hoping desperately that her hand would move through and dissolve the horrifying image in front of her.

It didn’t.

“Clarke?” she said, stomach lurching. _It’s not real. Clarke went to bed hours ago. These aren’t her clothes. This isn’t her._

“You’re running out of time, mom,” the girl said, her voice gravelly from havoc the radiation had wreaked on her throat, her skin, her insides.

Abby barely choked back a scream. 

***

“Why didn’t you tell me right away?” Jackson asked, and Abby fought the urge to roll her eyes.

“It happened last night,” she said. “I wasn’t going to wake you up to tell you. Nothing else has happened since then.”

Telling Jackson had been both one of the easiest and most difficult decisions Abby Griffin had had to make in her forty years. There was nothing else to be done – she wouldn’t risk her baby, and she needed to know how this would affect the child. (Short answer: it wouldn’t – if she survived six more months to deliver the baby, which Jackson couldn’t tell her for certain).

He also couldn’t tell her if there was a cure, but the look in his eyes when she told him about her hallucination spoke more than an entire conversation on the subject.

Jackson cocked an eyebrow, apparently still mistrusting of her. “You haven’t had any other hallucinations? No nausea?”

She knew she hadn’t hallucinated anything else: after Clarke, she hadn’t been seeing anything out of the ordinary. If she’d seen anything that didn’t belong in the realm of reality, Abby knew she’d remember – after all, the vision of her daughter with radiation burns, raised boils on her skin from where the poisonous fog and black rain had marred her pale skin…they were enough to haunt her every time she closed her eyes.

Nausea, however, was where things got complicated.

Being pregnant and having EMP brain damage wasn’t just a tragedy and an inconvenience. It was, from a medical standpoint, confusing. Wholly frustrating. Symptoms overlapped. Waking up this morning and throwing up could now be attributed to two things, instead of just one. And now, for good reason, Jackson would want to attribute it to the more dangerous of the two.

“Abby…” he started, but she didn’t let him finish.

“I threw up this morning, all right?” she said, waiting for her words to land and sink in, waiting for the inevitable argument to commence. “It was morning sickness. Nothing to be worried about.”

He typed a few things on his datapad, then turned back to her with a determined hollowness in his gaze.

“You can’t go into space,” Jackson said, his voice firm.

Abby scowled. At some point, she knew this was coming. She just hadn’t expected it to be so soon. Especially considering that Raven was still going, she had thought maybe – just maybe – making the trip wouldn’t be a battle her assistant would choose.

How wrong she’d been.

“I have to,” she retorted, eyes flashing. “You know that.”

He turned away from her, focused the intensity of his anger on the large screen at the back of the room. “Abby, it’s not worth the risk. You can teach Clarke or John, and they can go with Raven.”

“No, I can’t!” she exclaimed. She wasn’t yelling – not yet – but she was well on her way, feeling anger nipping at the back of her neck like flames of a fire. “Jackson, you know it’s a complex process. I don’t have time to teach someone else. It has to be me.”

Jackson glared at her for a few moments, letting the silence intensify his anger.

“You’re showing the same symptoms,” he said. “Sending you both up there isn’t reckless: it’s dangerous. What if you both have seizures? What if Raven’s symptoms worsen?”

“I’ll bring materials to treat her,” Abby interjected, but it wasn’t enough.

“And can she treat you?” he asked, all but slamming the datapad down on the table. Any harder, she thought, and it would have shattered. “If something would happen to you up there, would Raven know how to save you?”

Taken aback, Abby clenched her jaw and looked away.

He wasn’t wrong. Raven had no formal medical training – her abilities were limited to computers and machinery. If something happened to her on their trip, Abby had at least a decent chance of being able to help her; it was likely she’d walk away from it. But if the situation was reversed…a positive outcome became less likely.

Even if she were guided through what to do from the ground, the lack of fuel in the rocket meant every move on the shuttle would need to be planned down to the last second. If Raven stepped away from her post to help her, it could mean certain, fiery, explosive death for them both. Not to mention, no Nightblood.

Of course, she wouldn’t tell Jackson that.

“I have to try,” she said. “This isn't just our best chance, Jackson. It's our _only_ chance.”

Her assistant, a man she’d known since he was fifteen, stared at her as though he no longer recognized her. As though Abby Griffin had become a stranger to him, emptiness in his gaze where kindness and admiration had vacated.

“Kane wouldn’t want you to do this,” he said, and Abby seethed. Bringing Marcus into this was a low blow. She hadn’t told him yet – telling Jackson about her symptoms was one thing, but telling the man she loved was another.

Abby had only just told him he’d have a child, and Jackson couldn’t guarantee she’d be able to deliver the baby given the onset of her symptoms. The news had left her numb in places she hadn’t known could house feeling, broken down things inside her that couldn’t be fixed. It wasn’t certain, she told herself, swallowing sobs. Nothing was set in stone.

If she couldn’t process the news herself, how could she expect Marcus to do the same? How could she do that to him? Ripping the chance of fatherhood from him might be one of the most painful things she’d ever done, and she wasn’t willing to do it until every last bit of hope was drained from deep inside her.

“He didn’t like the idea before,” Jackson continued, “and with everything you told me…”

“Marcus doesn’t have to know,” Abby said, her heart lurching as her lips formed his name. “Not right now.”

 _Marcus._ Briefly, as the image of him flickered through her vision, it occurred to her that if she went into space she might never see him again. Even factoring out her condition, it was a possibility: if anything went wrong with the fuel, if their calculations were off, if Abby had to pilot the rocket…

She might never feel his arms, comforting and secure, pull her close again. She might never hear the softness of his voice when he said her name. She might never again lose herself in the depths of his soil-brown eyes, feel the decadent pressure of his mouth against hers.

It was all suddenly too damn much, and she looked down until her vision cleared and her lower lip steeled itself.

“You’re not going to tell him?” Jackson said, astounded.

“No,” Abby said, sensing where the conversation was headed. “I’m not going to worry him when he has all of Arkadia on his mind.”

 _It would ruin him,_ she thought. Marcus and the rest of the camp were already barely hanging in the balance after the explosion: the last thing she needed to do was tell him about what had happened – what was currently happening – inside her brain. He needed to be whole, complete, entirely devoted to his tasks as Chancellor. Giving him this news would make it impossible for him to do that.

Upon consideration, bitterness growing and expanding inside her chest, she spat, “And my personal life is _mine_ , Eric. What I share with him is none of your concern.”

Quiet, again, as both sides seethed. Then, in a voice too weak to shoulder an argument:

“Abby, please reconsider.”

She froze.

He sounded so much like the young boy she’d taken on as her assistant – the child who had lost his mother – that it very nearly fractured her resolve. And on some level his rage made sense; though not in the way it had twelve years ago, this ordeal had the potential for him to relive one of the most painful parts of his past. If she didn’t come back, it wouldn’t only be Marcus and Clarke who were affected.

“I can’t,” she said, softening her tone as understanding set in. “I won’t condemn our people to save my own life.”

Not to mention that her life would be far from saved, no matter what she chose. Whether she remained on the ground or journeyed into space, Abby knew one thing was absolutely certain: there was a definite chance that even if the Nightblood solution worked, she might not live to see it save their people.

“Until I know I’m going to die,” she said, her voice trembling on the last word, “I intend to live.”


	5. Rockets

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it took so long to update! I hope this chapter was worth the wait. :/

The next day began promptly at seven in the morning, when Abby was stirred from sleep with stomach cramps so intense she briefly wondered if she’d somehow slept through the next six months and was currently in the process of giving birth.

 _Pregnancy,_ she reminded herself as she kicked off the silky sheets, taking stock of her symptoms and deciding which were relevant to mention to Jackson (naturally, none of them were). _Not brain damage._

Not five minutes later, she had – much as she suspected she would – thrown up in the wastebasket next to her bed. At least the stomach cramps were gone, replaced by a slowly waning nausea.

Wondering if it was worth it to try for the last half-hour of sleep before her alarm blared, Abby reclined in bed and placed both hands on her growing stomach, her lips quirking upward in an amused smirk.

“You’re not making this easy on me,” she whispered as she closed her eyes, running her fingers up and down the smooth skin beneath her tank top.

And, as if father and child were joined by some cosmic connection, it was at that moment that Marcus’ voice sounded over Abby’s radio.

“Abby?” she heard him say, the back of her name clipped by the faulty reception in her room. Generally she would have tried to go to the hallway for better clarity, but right now – half asleep and her stomach still performing slow somersaults – she decided she might be able to live with hearing 80 percent of his words.

“Marcus, I-“ she started, but he was too quick.

“I can be there tomorrow,” he said in a rush, sounding almost panicked. “Bellamy and David Miller have agreed to keep the camp in line while I’m gone.”

Her stomach sank as the puzzle pieces of panic fell into place.

As far as she knew from Clarke’s conversations with Bellamy, everything was fine – or at least _survivable_ , for the time being at Arkadia. Which meant -

“Jackson told you.”

With silence devouring the other line, she swallowed hard.

Because of course Jackson told him everything, probably the moment Abby left the lab. Because if her assistant knew _he_ didn’t have enough emotional weight to swing her decision, he also knew how to contact someone who had enough to send her careening through space, to knock her permanently off-balance.

Because for all the arguments she thought she and him had resolved, he was still, at his core, completely and unreservedly devoted to her safety.

Damn him.

Damn them both.

“He radioed earlier today,” Marcus admitted, sounding equally bold and sheepish over the airwaves.  He knew this wasn’t information to which she would have wanted him to be privy, but at the same time, now that he was…God, they were headed for one hell of an argument.

Her head pounded, and her words tumbled out accompanied by an involuntary little wince. “He wasn’t supposed to do that. We _agreed_ he wouldn’t do that.”

“I know,” Marcus said. “But I’m happy he did. I never would have left you if I’d known what was going on. What was happening to your-“ he broke off, seemingly unable to validate the rest of the sentence by finishing it.

“Abby, please don’t do this,” he said, and the piercing sensation of her teeth against her lower lip was suddenly the only thing keeping her from crying. He sounded so lost, so small, so defeated; a shell of the man he’d been in Polis.

“I have to,” she said, wondering when the yelling would start. He’d try begging first, probably. Then, when that failed, they’d revert to earlier methods: screaming and yelling at each other until every breath and swallow radiated pain through hoarse throats. “Marcus, my injury isn’t fatal. If I get some rest, it’ll heal.”

“And have you been resting?” he asked, a pointed edge at the end of his question. He knew. She knew he knew.

And because she knew how well he knew her, she decided not to respond.

“No one else can go with Raven but me,” she said, determined to change the subject. “Jackson doesn’t know how to make Nightblood. I don’t have time to teach Clarke or any of the others. It has to be me.”

Her justifications fell on deaf ears.

“Have you been resting?” he repeated, that same pointed edge sharpening into something like anger.

“Yes,” she lied. Lying to Marcus wasn’t something she considered lightly – or typically, at all – but for now, it needed to be done. If she could undo the damage Jackson had done to his frame of mind and convince him he needed to stay in Arkadia, it would be a lot easier to keep going with her trip to space.

Abby didn’t know if she could leave the ground if she had to stare out the rocket’s window as they blasted off, taking in the tears on his cheeks as the countdown ended. That, she thought, might shatter her heart beyond repair.

“No, you haven’t,” Marcus countered. Now she was certain – his tone had morphed from casual attempts at convincing into flat-out rage.

And that realization was the final straw.

“Okay. You’re right. I haven’t,” she spat. “How could I? I’m trying to figure out how to make Nightblood. and how much of it we need after Raven and I come back from space. I’m trying to figure out how to save everyone. Is that what you wanted to hear? You were right?”

“Abby, I didn’t say you-“ he started, but she was nowhere near finished. It was as if his tone had opened a wound deep inside her, ripped stitches from a gash that formed on her heart from the moment they realized they had less than half a year to live. There was nothing to do but let the words pour out, unbidden, draining liters of discomfort and pent-up frustration into the open air.

“I can’t sleep because every time I close my eyes, I see my daughter with radiation burns and wake up in a cold sweat. I can’t sleep because I see you out there in black rain. I can’t sleep because I start thinking about how the next few hours might mean life and death for everyone I love, but I’m laying down in bed instead of working in the lab. So no, _Kane_ , I haven’t been resting.”

Using his surname was risky, but validating. She knew it would hit him where it hurt – and right now, that was all her aching mind and heart could aim to do.

“Just for once, I wish you would do what you _know_ is right,” he said, his words somehow both warm with emotion and frosted with anger. “That you’d let yourself heal. You know what to do, Abby. Jackson told you, and yet you’re not-“

He didn’t understand. Of all the things they’d shared, of the numerous similarities between them…how could he stop seeing eye-to-eye with her now? When she needed him most, where was the common ground they’d found?

Drowned under black rain, apparently.

“I’m trying to save everyone,” she interjected, uninterested in the rest of his sermon on self-care. “When the Nightblood is made and our people are safe, then I’ll rest.”

The other line was eerily quiet, and Abby realized she had no clue what was going on in Arkadia. Was it raining there? Had the signal been disrupted?

“Marcus?” she said, her feverish rage breaking into a blurry, foggy sort of fear. If her last words to the man she loved – the father of her child – had been an argument, she’d never forgive herself.

A few more seconds passed as Abby rested with one hand on her stomach and the other on the walkie, holding it to her ear with trembling hands. Then,

“I’m here.”

And just like that – like a flash of lightning – her anger was ablaze once more.

“Have you decided to stop lecturing me?” she snapped.

Another few seconds of quiet.

Had he really started giving her the silent treatment already? It had never worked on the Ark, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to work now. No matter what he did, she was going to space.

“I wasn’t trying to _lecture_ you,” he said, returning her tone with bitterness manifold. “I apologize for worrying about your safety, Doctor Griffin. If my concern isn’t welcome, I won’t voice it in the future.”

The use of proper terms wasn’t quite as amusingly incendiary when used against her, and Abby found herself biting her lip and resting the back of her head against the cool wall panels. Arguing with him in the past had been as easy as breathing. When had she forgotten how to inhale?

She knew the answer: when she started falling for him, she forgot how to breathe.

Thoughts muddled by anger and logic broken by pain, her next few words tumbled out in a desperate attempt to win the debate. It was a sentence she’d dwell upon in the hours to come, a double-digit distraction from Raven’s prattling about the rocket. In those desolate moments, she found herself wishing she could go back and snatch those words from midair, wished she could disrupt the signal between their radios so her statement never reached his ears.

Unfortunately, at the present moment, the sentence seemed all too viable, too perfect, too guaranteed to close his mouth and hand her a title she’d find later she never wanted.

“Are you worried about me?” she said, seething, “or are you just protecting the baby?”

And just like that, the whole world stopped.

With nothing but static on the other line, Abby was left with naught but her frenzied, half-coherent thoughts. She knew it wasn’t true almost as decisively as she’d known she had to say it. It seemed like the most sensitive spot to aim a punch – a desperate swing at knocking the argument asunder, a chink in his otherwise logical, foolproof armor – but now, she realized she’d made things worse than before.

“Marcus,” she said, dropping his surname in favor of a hushed, apologetic plea. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I’m-”

“It was _very_ clear what you meant,” he said, an even emotionlessness replacing the rush of warmth that usually accompanied her name.

Heart sinking, Abby reeled from the impact of his reaction.

“I shouldn’t have said it,” she apologized, sick with the understanding that she’d gone too far and would pay for it for the foreseeable future: likely for as long as they were separated.

So she said the only thing she could really say – the two words that usually left her with a sour taste in her mouth and a splitting headache. As fate would have it, by the time her lips formed them she had already long ago developed both: a side effect of their argument.

“I’m sorry,” she said, begging him without words, imploring him to understand that it was rage – not earnestness – that had driven those words from her tongue.

“Bellamy needs me,” Marcus droned, frighteningly measured in spite of his simmering rage. “He thinks a storm might be coming.”

Abby heard nothing in the background, but realized now wasn’t the time to debate his claim.

“Okay,” she said, swallowing hard with blurry vision. “Okay. Stay safe, Marcus. Please.”

“You, too.”

The line went quiet.

Her alarm went off.

* * *

“Go to bed, Abby.”

Raven’s voice carried across the lab, and although she was inside the rocket she heard her as clearly as though the mechanic had been standing next to her.

“I’m not tired, Raven,” she retorted, hoping the girl would press the matter no further. Unfortunately, her hopes went unanswered.

“We’re going to space tomorrow. You need to get some rest. I can’t have you passing out on me in the middle of our flight.”

“Raven, you’re piloting the ship. _You_ should get some sleep.”

Raven emerged from the rocket, practically skipping down the stairs. Abby wondered how much of her good humor came from her brain’s exertion-caused imbalances and found irony in their exchange: both of their brains suffering, showing symptoms in different ways, but both insisting on the same thing.

The girl was by her side in less than a minute, her ponytail swinging as she ascended the stairs in a rush.

“I’m not tired, Abby,” she said, aiming a wink her way. Abby sighed, realizing Jackson would have to handle this particular obstacle. There was no way they’d be able to go into space with a pilot who had stayed up all night the night before.

“Even if you’re not tired,” Abby said, “you still need rest. You need energy and sleep to get through tomorrow. Your brain might not handle the exertion otherwise.”

Some tiny part of her thought that advice might also apply to her – heard Marcus telling her, not for the first time in the past ten hours, that she knew what she needed to do to help herself and voluntarily chose not to do it.

“Are you kidding?” Raven grinned, spun in a circle with her arms wide. “I feel great! Abby, we’re going into space. Not gonna lie…it’ll be nice to see it up close again.”

Abby frowned, buried her gaze in her microscope, and Raven seemed to sense something was off.

“You okay?” she asked, moving closer, her peppy grin replaced by concern and furrowed brows.

“I’m…” Abby started, focusing the microscope as she spoke, “fine.”

“Bullshit,” Raven said. “It’s Kane, isn’t it?”

She went rigid, tearing her gaze from blood cells and blurry lines.

“Marcus and I are fine.”

“Doesn’t sound like it to me.”

“ _Raven_.”

The girl put her hands up in mock surrender, feigning intimidation.

“I’m just saying, he’s the only one who can get you pissed off like this. I could tell all day that you weren’t acting like you. Jackson thought-“

Abby bit her tongue, reminded that Jackson, in a roundabout way, was the reason for their argument. At some point, Abby had been planning to tell Marcus about her brain – it just wouldn’t have been until long after she’d healed.

“Here,” Raven said, holding out her radio. “Take mine. The range is better on it, so you’ll get reception in your room.”

Abby raised her eyebrows. “Why would I need reception in my room, Raven?”

“Because you’re going to bed. Right now. And you’re gonna talk things out with Kane in privacy.”

Abby spun in her seat, directly facing the girl. The offer was tempting – Raven had programmed her radio to get a better signal, and it would be nice to not have to migrate to the hallway every time Marcus tried to contact her. But at the same time…the thought of talking to him again made her stomach lurch, given the way they left things before they day started. And it was _Raven’s_ radio…

“Marcus and I don’t need to-“

“Yeah, you do,” Raven interjected. “I really don’t want to go to space tomorrow with you if you’re just gonna be lovesick over Kane the whole time. Better if you guys make up now than trying to do it tomorrow over our comms link.”

Well…she had a point.

Out of the corner of her eye, Abby glimpsed Jackson making his way back to the lab from a brief nap. He would soon begin pressuring her to go to bed, and although she could handle one or the other, there was little chance she could hold her own against both her assistant and her future pilot.

“Okay,” Abby said, reaching for the radio with one hand while removing hers from its place next to the microscope.

Raven’s eyes widened. Apparently, agreement had been the last thing on her mind.

“Nice!” she exclaimed, turning Abby’s radio over in her hand as if trying to get a feel for the new device. “See ya in the morning. Go make up with your boyfriend before we blast off.”

Abby gave her one last look before descending the stairs, reminding her it was just as important that she get some sleep, too.

The journey to her room lasted less than five minutes, and Abby barely made it inside the door without collapsing. Exhaustion, it seemed, seeped into her bones only when she stepped through the threshold of her quarters.

Refocusing her energy, she carefully set the radio down on her dresser in the same space her old one had occupied. She then removed her shirt and jeans – Becca’s lab had many things, but not pajamas – and with a quiet promise to shower in the morning, she slid beneath the covers and closed her eyes.

She knew she should radio Marcus. Sleep wouldn’t visit until her apology was accepted, and the argument was festering into a nasty, aching infection that seeped into her every thought. Going into space without clearing the air between them was unthinkable, but right now, so was picking up that radio.

Then, it did something she never thought it would do – something that saved her quite a bit of trouble.

It hummed with white noise.

“Marcus?” she breathed, reaching over to retrieve it. almost unwilling to let herself hope. If it wasn’t him and she’d gotten her hopes up for nothing…

“Abby,” he said, his voice considerably calmer, and she let herself exhale as guilt stretched inside her chest.

“I’m sorry for what I said earlier,” she said, hoping that time would make him a more receptive listener. “I didn’t mean it. I know you’re trying to help, and I know you care what happens to me. I’m just…” she paused, gritted her teeth as a throbbing in her head marred her words into a wince. “I’m a little stressed.”

When he spoke, he was a different man than the one who hung up hours ago. This Marcus – her Marcus – was kind, soft, gentle, remorseful.

“I’m sorry for what I said, too,” he murmured – even the slight interference, the brushstrokes of static, couldn’t paint over the regret in his voice. “You know me better than anyone, Abby. And you have every right to be stressed. I shouldn’t have made it worse.”

She laughed. Of course, of course Marcus Kane would find a way to blame himself for something she had said.

“You didn’t,” she consoled him. “I made it worse. You were trying to help.”

She could see him shaking his head, although he was miles away and her eyes were fixed on her bedroom ceiling. “I went about it the wrong way,” he said. “Instead of trying to discuss it, I made the decision for you. That’s not what…” he paused, searching for the right words. “That’s not what I want us to be. And I’m sorry I put you through it.”

And there it was, hidden between those seven words: _we are equals_.

Marcus would never make her choices for her, no matter how much it pained him to think of the consequences of her decisions. And she would do the same: allow him to walk his path, so long as their journeys intertwined.

Truthfully, she’d always known if he found out that he’d try to stop her. But she hadn’t counted on the rage he’d displayed, the outward defiance he fired her way. It occurred to her that this wasn’t the closest he’d come to losing her – they’d had several run-ins with dangers that threatened to part them permanently.

But this was one that he could do nothing about, and that likely terrified him to his core.

At Mount Weather, he’d been able to yell and delay the guards. In the City of Light, he’d been able to help the kids – at least until he was forced to take the chip himself. But Marcus Kane couldn’t distract her brain from breaking down. He couldn’t take a pill to save her, he couldn’t yell and beg to keep the hallucinations at bay. It was then that she realized where his uncharacteristic anger had originated: a place of helplessness.

“I don’t want that, either,” Abby said softly, wishing she could hold him instead of running her fingers over the weathered, scuffed plastic of the radio. “But it’s not who we are. Parents fight, Marcus.”

She stopped, the next few words lodging in her throat as her left hand came to rest on her belly. The place where their child grew each day, safe despite the danger pushing ever closer to their doorstep, living in a world that was slowly being ripped from its grasp.

And in spite of it all, she’d still said that one word – the one little word that betrayed every ounce of hope that still glimmered inside her confused, scared, directionless heart.

_Parents._

When he spoke, she could tell his thoughts orbited the same territory.

“Parents,” he said, a smile warming his words. And in all her time at the lab – just when she thought it couldn’t get worse – the pain of needing him in her arms grew tenfold, blossomed into something beautiful and agonizing and wholly uncontrollable inside her chest. “Abby, we’re going to be parents.”

There was something shifting in the space between his words, nightmarish doubts she knew his words dredged up in the back of his mind, a plea for her to stay safe. For her to rest so her brain could heal. For her to hold on long enough for him to make it to the lab, so he could hold her and kiss her and reassure her that everything was going to be all right as long as they were together.

God, how she wanted to be able to obey him.

But for just a little while longer – for a few more days – she’d have to rebel. Once the Nightblood was made and distributed, she would let herself take a nice, long nap: preferably in his arms.

Her fingertips grazed the smooth skin just below her navel, where a solid bump was beginning to take shape. She smiled, knowing her expression matched his.

“We are,” she said firmly, as though the strength behind her words alone might stave off the impending doomsday. “We are.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m okay with arguing,” he said, his voice small and soft – a creature so far removed from the man she’d known on the Ark that they might as well belong to a different species. “These past few hours have been hell, Abby.”

A laugh wormed its way up her throat and shoved her lips open. She figured the noise must have translated well over the radio, because Marcus responded to it.

“What’s funny?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said, raising an eyebrow. “It’s just…if someone had told me a year ago that Marcus Kane would be torn up over arguing with me, I would have told them to float themselves.”

It was his turn to laugh, then. “Things have certainly changed, haven’t they?”

How she wished she could kiss him, pull him close, let the sound of his heartbeat drown out the drumbeat of war moving closer. “They have. _We_ have.”

Quiet for a few moments, as he contemplated. Abby took the opportunity to slide beneath her sheets, thankful that Raven’s radio had better reception than hers. It would always be a mystery as to why her own hadn’t been able to reach Arkadia from her room, but she was thankful to the young mechanic for trading. It must have been obvious, she thought, that she needed it.

Her bedsheets were lukewarm with muted body heat, a luxury partially taken by her comforter and partially absorbed by the open air. Abby didn’t mind the coolness on her bare legs, the softness of the threads smoothing at least a few of her worries about the day ahead.

She’d never known comfort quite like this on the Ark, and the only thing that came close – their shared bed in Polis – was now naught more than a treasured memory. If only Marcus were here, she thought, it would be every bit as indulgent as their quarters in the tower had been.

Resting her head against the soft pillow, she gave a faint sigh. Tomorrow would come, as it always did. She would go to space with Raven, and make the Nightblood. Certainly, there were hypotheticals – questions to lead her weary mind deeper into the labyrinth of uncertainty that comprised their lives on Earth – but for now, the man she loved was on the other end of the radio.

“I won’t tell you not to go,” he said, his voice a broken echo of his earlier insistence. “You know what’s best for our people. What’ll help us survive. But Abby…please be careful.”

“I will,” she said. “I promise.”

Relief resounded through his response. “And you’re sure nothing would happen to the baby? Jackson said it wouldn’t. He tried to explain it to me, but…”

She smiled. For all his good qualities, Marcus Kane would never be a doctor or a scientist. 

“We were born in space,” she said, condensing the science to give him the gist of what the medical explanation meant. “That means I’m strong enough to carry the baby back into orbit without taking any extra precautions. In theory, I could even give birth there.”

His quiet showed his discomfort at the idea, and she decided it was best to keep the conversation moving.

“Everything will be fine,” she said, doing her best to soothe his fears while keeping the edges of her own sanded down to a dullness that at least allowed her to sleep. “I shouldn’t be up there for longer than five hours. That’s all the fuel we have.”

She knew, even without him saying it, that those five hours would be some of the longest of his life.

“I love you, Abby,” he said.

“I love you, too,” she responded. 

If something went wrong, if she and Raven couldn’t make it back…she needed to say it.

Most importantly, she needed him to hear it.

* * *

“So, you’re pregnant,” Raven said. Her tone left little room for debate, and Abby instinctively checked to be sure she wasn’t broadcasting their conversation from space back to the entire lab, and subsequently, the rest of Arkadia.

How had she found out?

Had it been Clarke? John? Neither of them would have told her, which left only one culprit. But Jackson, as close as he was with Raven…it was unlikely he would have allowed such sensitive information to spill forth, especially considering Abby was his oldest friend and mentor.

Raven looked back at her from her perch among the shining, almost iridescent monitors that lined the far wall of the ship. Abby realized her expression must have been something approaching terror, because Raven gave her a pitying smirk and changed her approach.

“Don’t freak out on me, Abby,” she said, idly swinging her legs back and forth below the countertop.

Far easier said, Abby thought, than done.

“Who told you?” Abby said, equally amazed and mortified.

For a split second, she wondered whether for all the pain the mechanic had been through, her brain had really been given an upgrade. Could the City of Light still connect them, even though the chips had long ago been fried?

Because she hadn’t begun showing, really – whatever tiny bump existed was easy to camouflage behind her regular clothes – and to the majority of their people, Abby’s pregnancy was still a well-guarded secret. No one but Marcus was close enough to see the faint lines on her abdomen at the end of the day, glaring red marks where the waistband of her pants dug in a little tighter than usual.

That would be another problem, eventually – maternity wear and where to find it – but one problem, she thought, at a time. She could deal with the absence of suitable maternity clothes once everyone had been injected with Nightblood.

“No one told me,” Raven said, sliding down from her seat to join Abby by the microscope. “I figured it out on my own.”

Abby looked away, quirked an eyebrow. They didn’t have much time left for this kind of banter – in less than ten minutes, they’d be in position to begin manufacturing the Nightblood. Conversations like this were well and good now, but Abby didn’t want to start anything that couldn’t be finished when they were in position.

“You’d be the first,” Abby muttered, focusing her energy on relocating a tray of materials to the space between her microscope and a rack of test tubes.

“I usually am,” the girl said with a wink, leaning against the table with a smirk.

Abby couldn’t take it anymore. With eight minutes left on the clock, she had to know.

“Really, Raven. You looked at me and decided I was pregnant?”

Raven shook her head. “No, not right away. It took me a few days to figure out why you were acting weird.”

“I was _not_ acting weird,” Abby said, defensive. Because if Raven thought she was acting different – acting _strangely_ – then who was to say Emori or Luna hadn’t thought the same thing? Who was to say others at Arkadia might not have thought the same thing? Could her secret already have gotten out, and she and Marcus were too blind to notice?

Raven snorted. “Whatever makes you feel better.”

They stared at each other for a few moments, each daring the other to give in. Abby almost wondered if Raven’s estimation came from a link between their brains – something caused by the EMP damage and residual ALIE interference – but it was a theory at best, a possible explanation for something that had likely been guesswork and a bullseye at a moving target of mood swings.

“Kane will be a good dad,” Raven said at last, giving Abby a small, genuine smile. Surprised by the tenderness in her statement – a softness generally removed from Raven Reyes’ bravado – Abby’s response was nothing but instinctual.

“He will,” she agreed.

“I mean, he’s basically everyone’s dad _already_. What’s one more kid on the list? He already has at least ten.”

Abby couldn’t quite shove down a laugh. Raven’s number was an exaggeration, but the core of it was true, she knew. Marcus was already a father in all but blood to Bellamy and Octavia, and it was clear from his interactions with Clarke before she left that he’d practically adopted her as well. She’d seen him often enough with Nathan and Harper to assume they were close, and recently, she’d glimpsed him talking to Monty.

But the baby she carried would be different. This would be their child, not a delinquent they’d sent to Earth. This would be a child they brought into this world not because they needed to test its survivability, but because they wanted to be parents. Because they wanted him or her in their lives.

“I don’t know if he has _that_ many,” Abby countered with a knowing smirk.

“Between the two of you, you sure as hell do,” Raven said. “I mean, he has Bellamy, Octavia, Harper, Miller, and Monty. You have me, Clarke, Jackson, and Murphy-“

“When did I adopt John, Raven?”

She laughed. “Yeah, you’re right. I think he adopted _you_.”

Abby hardly thought John Murphy would allow himself to be adopted – he tolerated her, certainly, but to go so far as taking care of him and Emori would be a hugely difficult task. Not to mention they were entirely self-sufficient; they didn’t need her, or Marcus, watching over them. The rest of the kids…well, they’d become a family by default, almost.

She smiled as she remembered a particularly poignant memory from before the City of Light, before the current crisis, when they’d had a few precious months of calm.

“You agree?” Raven said, returning her smile. Abby shook her head.

“No, just thinking about something else.”

She had gone to see him after a long night of working in the Chancellor’s office. Dawn had only just begun crawling over the treetops, sprinkling the navy sky with streaks of orange. It was easy to forget her workload when she was with him – to ask him how his night had been, to inquire about the guards and the kids – and easier still to forget how far her daughter was from her embrace. With Marcus, even then, everything had felt right.

She’d knocked on his door twice before realizing it was open – it took her a few seconds longer to realize he wasn’t inside. Eventually she’d ended up wandering aimlessly around a sleepy, barely-moving Arkadia in an attempt to find him, to have a few moments of quiet solitude with the man who had become her rock, her constant.

Her feet took her to the common area, just beyond the piano. She thought he might be there, working at one of the tables; not quite what she found.

Surprisingly, Marcus was fast asleep on the couch in the far corner of the room – a brand new piece of furniture from Mount Weather that hadn’t yet found a more suitable home – with his head lolled back, snoring soundly. But the true shock came in looking to his left and right, where two young members of the guard had curled up beside him.

Harper had fallen asleep with her head on his shoulder, her blonde braid trailing down his upper arm, while Nathan had simply flopped over into Marcus’ lap, laying face-up across his legs. It was a wonder, Abby thought, that he hadn’t fallen over. They must have been discussing strategy and been overtaken by exhaustion; or rather, as she suspected, Marcus had fallen asleep with the kids by his side, and they had fallen asleep trying to decide whether or not to wake him.

Her smile widened as she remembered contemplating whether or not to wake them. Ultimately, she chose to let them sleep – although the kids might be embarrassed later, the image was too sweet, too innocent, to tarnish. Instead she’d walked away and headed to Medical for her morning shift, expecting a visit from Marcus that came an hour later.

“Hey, Abby,” Raven said, startling her from her reverie. “Five minutes on the clock. Just letting you know.”

“All right,” Abby said. She cleared the cobwebs of memory from her mind, refocusing on the task at hand. “I’m almost ready.”

Raven explained that they’d have a half-hour to make as much Nightblood as they could, and then she’d be forced to begin the descent process as to not engulf them into a fiery, painful crash landing. Abby figured she could manufacture quite a bit in that time – enough to save everyone – given that nothing went wrong or malfunctioned. With any luck, she thought, they wouldn’t have any trouble.

Then again, when was the last time their plans had gone smoothly?

“Seriously, though,” Raven said, raising her voice to be heard from across the room. “If you were going to get knocked up, I’m happy it was Kane.”

Abby smirked. _Who else would it be, Raven?_

“Me, too,” she whispered to herself, assembling materials on the countertop and waiting for Raven’s order to go ahead. Their communications with the ground would be disrupted until they were in position, but all things considered…Abby thought it might not have been the worst thing that she couldn’t talk to anyone there.

Abby glanced at the clock: two minutes until she could start bonding the elements.

“Do you think it’ll work?” Raven asked suddenly, her voice oddly tremulous, a chink in her usual bravado. Abby knew this was the result of her brain damage – the stroke she’d had only days ago – and knew that for the two of them, this trip meant something other than just survival.

Because they both knew, on some level, that survival wasn’t guaranteed for them; even if the Nightblood protected their people, allowed them to walk in black rain and breathe radiation-soaked air, that they might not live much longer than the onset.

There was a minute and thirty seconds on the clock, and as much as Abby wanted to comfort her, there was little to be said in such a short amount of time. So, in lieu of getting up and giving her the hug she so desperately wished to bestow, Abby simply responded, “It has to.”

 _It does,_ she thought. Without the Nightblood, they were doomed. Everything rode on the next half-hour and how many doses she could make during that scant, easily-withered timeframe.

Her hands started shaking, and she took a deep breath.

One minute on the clock.

As if on cue, her head started hurting.

Pain blossomed slowly throughout the first ten seconds – a gradual throbbing centered at the space that joined her head and the back of her neck. At first she mistook it for stress, as she always did – told herself the lie she needed to hear.

Fifty seconds on the clock.

The pain radiated upward like a sapling stretching its branches, encompassing the entire back of her head. Abby winced and gritted her teeth against the sharpening, steady waves of agony. Her fingers clenched around the metal of her seat, closing with enough force to part her skin.

Forty seconds on the clock.

The pain stopped, if only for a moment, but something felt off. Wrong, as if the world were still spinning, still moving, but backwards. Her lungs felt as though they’d shrunk to half-capacity, burned like they’d been set on fire.

And yet, from somewhere, she heard a voice that wasn’t Raven’s.

Thirty seconds on the clock.

“Hi,” the voice said, and Abby spun in her seat as though she’d been spun around by forces larger than herself, dropping both hands to her sides as she searched for their phantom intruder.

 _It’s not real,_ she reminded herself. _There’s no one here but you and Raven. Focus on what needs to be done._

But try as she might, she couldn’t tune out the voice. It was small but insistent, quiet but determined, and grew louder with each agonizing pulse of pain that spread throughout her head.

Twenty seconds on the clock.

Abby felt a tug on her hand and jumped, looked down to find the source of the gesture. Her head now felt as though it had been clamped in a vise, each second tightening the mechanism until she found herself barely able to choke back screams. The simple gesture of looking down – tilting her head in the process – made tiny stars shimmer at the edges of her vision.

Ten seconds on the clock.

Abby looked down and finally found the voice – the source of the commotion. When she did, every muscle in her body stiffened.

It was a little girl – she could be no older than five or six. Her skin was pale but not sickly, sprinkled by a youthful pinch of redness at her cheeks. She wore a simple shirt with a patch on the elbow and well-worn jeans, clothes not dissimilar to the ones Clarke had worn in her childhood on the Ark. Her thick, dark brown hair was pulled back into a braid, and expressive chocolate eyes stared up into her own, radiating innocence and wonder.

Five seconds on the clock.

Abby found herself unable to let go of the girl’s hand, perhaps because her brain no longer responded to her commands. There was a world outside this child, she knew, but something held her transfixed in this moment, cemented in place as the world moved on around them. Her heart raced, and she felt her fingers twitch against the warmth of the girl’s skin.

Four seconds on the clock.

Abby heard someone else’s voice in the background, but no longer remembered whom she was with. Was there anyone else here? All around her objects began to look foreign, strange, as though the lights of the shuttle were dimming around the little girl by her side.

Three seconds on the clock.

On a logical level, she knew the pain in her head was agonizing. But emotionally, she no longer responded to the torture: it was as though somehow, this child had broken the connection between her pain receptors and the rest of her being. Everything hurt, but everything was numb.

Two seconds on the clock.

The girl smiled – a sweet, careless quirk of her lips that accentuated the brilliant spark in her eyes - and Abby felt an instinctive sort of warmth blossoming through her chest. Her own expression mirrored the child’s, as though her heart gave her no other option than to share in her companion’s apparent joy at seeing her.

One second on the clock.

“Hi, mommy,” the girl whispered, her voice a tinkling bell, the sound of a gentle rainstorm.

Then everything went black.


End file.
